Vanished

How does a whole year of pictures just vanish?

I've spent the evening looking around on nearly three terabytes' worth of hard drives in the house. Out of more than 35,000 images I've bulldozed into a big pile on the MacBook Pro, I can locate exactly nine images shot in 2005.

Nine.

Where the fuck does a whole year disappear? My suspicion is that those images were when I didn't yet use iPhoto to collect up my images, and simply copied them to a drive on the XP machine which blew up this summer. What's odd about that is that I usually also copied them somewhere else, like the server. They're not there. They're not, apparently, anywhere.

Fuck.

Just like that, I'm missing almost exactly a year's worth of images. Literally. The last ones I have are from late 2004, and then there's a huge gap, punctuated only by one image from a reunion in the summer of 2005, and a few images of the now-departed red Passat in November. Absolutely nothing in between. The next image is the kissing-your-sister New Year's date I had with the lawyer from DC 2005/2006. The enormous abundance of images before and after this blank space is rather eerie. Lots of images of Melody and Penny and Mary, and then afterwards tons of things of Suzanne.

I kinda liked 2005. Meeting Belinda, having a great New Year's Eve with Terry and then a trip to New York with her. A whole summer spent with Susan, including some really great pictures of her, one of which I framed.

Admittedly, some of these might be on a machine at work, as sometimes I copied images to a portable drive and took them to work so that I could send them out to be printed. but I'd guess, based on how many images I often took, that there are around 1500 missing images, minimum. No doubt I still have videotape and all, but shit...

I also could not find the 100Gb drive out of the dead iBook 933. I suspect that that drive might have some images on them, since I often had that around when I was shooting images, but in theory at least, all that shit should have been then transferred to the new iBook 1.42 or the MacBook Pro.

I have Lotusphere pictures from January, 2005 and January, 2006, even though the iBook 933 died on the way home from there, January 29, 2006.

I just refuse to believe that with all the needless duplicates I tend to make of images, none of these survived.

This blows ass. Motherfucking Windows. Bill Gates, you can die in hell with a flaming pole up your ass. Eat hot shit.