Painting WIPs, Bad Luck, and Hard Drive Update (Patreon)

I've had a string of bad luck this past week or so. There was the spider hard drive incident. 

I started working off of a different hard drive and I accidentally unplugged it while using it. And that drive got corrupted too!

Two hard drives in one week. 

I cut my finger open with a box cutter the other day. There's been other things not going so well recently. I've just felt kind of down and out of it. But I won't bore you with that.

I'll bore you with the data recovery saga!

I sent the first drive to a data recovery lab. They sent me a diagnosis. Their quote was way higher than what they advertised initially. So I said "no thanks." 

Understandably, the lab wasn't in any hurry to get me my drive back. There was always something, "It's still in our lab...the technician is out today..." straight to voicemail. no response. 

Meanwhile I found another data recovery place that seemed much more transparent, had solid reviews, and was way less expensive.

I finally just drove to the lab, pounded on the door. No response. I kicked it in. "w-what do you want," the frightened nerds quivered. 

"My drive."

"r-right away sir...someone get this man's drive...w-whats the case number?"

I roared across the highway from the lab. Original spider drive and the newly corrupted drive riding shotgun. Dragula by Rob Zombie. 

I dropped them off at the new lab. My final hope.

They sent me an email the next day saying they could recover 100% of the data on one drive and 99.99999% of the data on the other. 

Both drives cost me less than what the first place was charging for one. Still expensive. I still took a bath. But a manageable bath.

I took a screenshot of the email.

I printed out the screenshot. Drove back to the first lab in the dead of night. I left the printed screenshot with a dagger buried deep into their door.

Anyways. Boring.

My finger is still healing. My wallet is going to hurt for a while. But I think I'm on the home stretch in this unlucky week. 

It's funny. As I talked about in my stay cation video, things always get a little weird for me around this time of year. I took the staycation to maybe escape the weirdness. But the weirdness found me. 

As the book of Ecclesiastes says

 "I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favor to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all."

I've come to realize that when this type of bad luck happens, painting is all I can do. Painting is the area where I have some control.

Ultimately, all my hard drives will stop working. Most likely all my work will eventually be lost. The other day at a thrift store looking for something for the prompt this month I heard a woman say "It's crazy that you cherish these things your whole life and they just bring 'em here after you die."

But right now, I can paint. 

As I'm typing this I accidentally set my phone down on some wet paint.