Let me tell you what happened...

I was getting lazy. I knew it. I was doing nothing but posting pictures here, because, well, pictures/1000 words, you know the saying.

I would get back to writing about my adventures, I promised myself. Soon.

Then, my computer stopped computing. In fact, it stopped doing anything. All I got was white, with a picture of a file in the centre -- a file with a great big question mark in it.

I always thought that the blue screen of death (something I encountered with great regularity when I was dealing with PC's) was the worst screen to get. I was wrong. The white screen -- the one with the file and the question mark -- that's the worst.

I did what little I could to regain control, then packed my computer up and took it to my neighbourhood Mac store. "Fix it," I said.

"What was it doing?" asks the fresh faced young man behind the desk.

I described what I saw, and the mock look of concern deepened to something resembling -- well, real concern, I guess.

"Could be the hard drive," he mumbled, writing furiously. "Leave it with us, and we'll fix you up."

Then he looked up from his writing. "Do you want us to attempt to recover your files?"

"If it comes to that," I replied. I was still feeling all right. I had my machine in the hands of the experts and they had not let me down yet. "Sure. Why not?"

What a difference a few days make.

I was out of town when I got the bad news.

"Your computer is on the roof," my husband said.

"What?" (I didn't get this reference. Not at first.)

"Your hard drive is fried. They'll replace it. But they couldn't save anything."

"What??" (I didn't get this reference either. And you can now call me thick, if you want. I didn't WANT to get this reference. I knew, in my heart of hearts, what this referred to, and I didn't want to hear it. Not in the least.)

"I'm sorry." (And he was. He knew I had to come home eventually, and then he'd have to deal with me face to face.)

So, there it was. My computer died, taking everything with it. Luckily I had most of my writing saved elsewhere, but I lost all my pictures. Everything taken in the past two years. This included all the photos I'd taken of the renovation.

So, now I will have to go back to my words to finish this tale, because I don't have anything else. But that's all right. It's a bit like the man who took a city slicker out in a canoe to see whales. The whales were coming up right beside the small boat, blowing water up into the air in rainbows all around them, leaping from the water gracefully and generally having an overwhelmingly good time around the small boat.

"I wish I'd brought a camera," said the city slicker.

"Why?" asked the man. "Do you think you're going to forget this?"

I am not going to forget this reno -- not unless I do so consciously, just to save my sanity. So, I will go back to my words, and paint pictures that way.

Oh, and the "on the roof" reference? It's the punchline to a bad joke about a guy whose mother died.

"Mom's on the roof." Hilarious.