The other day, adware started downloading while I was surfing and soon after a virus message began popping up. Before I could do a system restore, my system froze up. I couldn't log off, so I knocked it off via the surge protector. Bad move. When I rebooted, the system looped back to the safe mode page and wouldn't let me back into Windows. Which devastatingly meant that I would have to do a total wipe out with the recovery disk. Fortunately, many of my older documents and pics were backed up; unfortunately, my newer works-in-progress weren't.

Thankfully, my previous need for validation saved the day because I was able to e-mail friends and colleagues whom I had sent various works to for critiquing and ask if they could send the works back to me. They responded and I was able to retrieve at least the more important works. Needless to say, I will be doing backups on a regular basis now using old-fashioned disks (b/c I'm too lazy to pull the external hard drive out of the closet and hook it up to the USB everytime I want to back up). Lesson learned.