It Was One Year Ago

Last year during the kids April vacation from school, we packed up and jetted off to San Diego for the week. It was kind of a spur of the moment trip for us and by spur of the moment I mean the we only booked it about six weeks before we left. I am a planner and for me, that was very last minute. My sister in law, brother in law and adorable nephew live in San Diego, and since we don’t see them as much as we wish we did, we thought we’d go to them for a visit.

We left on a Friday and I surprised the kids, who knew nothing about the trip, by picking them up from school early. Chris & I took them to lunch and told them that we were going to California. They had never been to CA before, so to say they were excited was a total understatement.

I made the decision beforehand not to bring my laptop with me on the trip. We had some major things planned for the week (Disney Land, the San Diego Zoo and Sea World to name a few), not to mention that I wanted to spend as much time with my in-laws as possible, so I figured I wouldn’t have much time to keep up with things on my end – hence my decision to leave my laptop home.

What I did was line up a bunch of guest posts for my blog before I left, so that way things wouldn’t go unattended for an entire week. I got some great posts in and was really excited to share them with my readers. The first two days, the posts went up without a hitch, but on the third day something horrible happened.

Apparently the post for that day contained some sort of a bad link and ended up shutting down my entire site. I got a whole slew of texts and emails that morning, but I was on my way out to the San Diego Zoo, so I did the only thing I could think of to do at the time – I emailed the person who designed my site in the first place to see if she could get in and see what was going on. Of course, the one time I don’t have my laptop ended up being the time I needed it the most.

She was able to get the post removed, but the damage had been done. She spent the better part of a week working on my site trying to get everything restored, but eventually she broke the bad news to me. Not only had I lost about 90% of the images on my site (at that point I had three and a half years worth of posts, so that was A LOT of images), but I had lost the past years worth of content. Gone.

I cried. Literally.

It wasn’t so much that I lost hundreds of hours of hard work on the posts, but my posts are personal to me. I blog about the things I do with my family and to lose a years worth of memories in an instant was devastating. I truly believe that the designer did everything she could do to get them back for me, but I had to accept that they were gone forever.

Honestly, at that point I considered stopping blogging all together. I mean, if something so small could cause so much damage in an instant, why bother? Chris reminded me that we were in the middle of a vacation (remember we were still across the country in California while all of this happened). He said that I should post about our California adventures and then see how I felt after I was done posting about our trip.

Obviously I came to my senses and here I am leaving for San Diego again today – but I am taking my laptop with me…..you know, just in case.