Remember to purr

Things are going up and down here at &Duck world. I'm definitely getting better, but it's a slow and seemingly haphazard process. My days are good and during them I feel hopeful for a swift recovery followed by a relaxing holiday. However, I keep waking up in the early hours of my nights with horrible uterine cramps that make it impossible to lie still or quietly, so unfortunately Best Beloved tends to wake as well. We're both walking around with saggy baggy undereyes. It's become a cycle: wake up hurting, feel great during the day, feel positive around dinner, and then dread bedtime.

Last night it happened again, so I walked around for a while, then took some painkillers and lay back down. Mr Pooter decided to jump up and see what we were up to, which is quite usual, and then, quite unusually, climbed up onto me and lay on my womby bits and started purring. My first instinct was to push him off, but then I realised that the weight and the warmth were pretty good, a bit like a wheat pack, and a few healing purrs always help. Before I knew it, I was asleep, lying on my back with the cat draped on me, and I woke hours later feeling ok again. Clever puss.

The other DOWN thing is that I noticed that I'm getting a bit low on space on my computer, so I decided to do a bit of backing up and deleting to make some room. Unfortunately my addled brain got a bit ahead of itself and I accidentally deleted my whole photo folder, and before I noticed what I'd done, I'd emptied the trash. When I realised what I'd done I had what I can only describe as an Ovid moment: I turned into a crow on the spot, and started walking around the house flapping my arms saying 'FAAARKKK! FAARK!'. Metamorphosis back to human form took a while, I can tell you. I had the presence of mind to turn the computer off right away, and I've spent the last couple of days trying to retrieve the lost data in various ways, but Macintosh is too tricky, and even after buying equally tricky software, they have gone for good. And I eventually had to make a choice between trying to retrieve data for my own selfish purposes or doing some productive work for angsty clients who have been very patient over the last few weeks. So I made the sensible choice and started work again, which definitely overrides the lost files.

Luckily it is only the last 5 months worth of unbacked-up images (what can I say? I'm a busy, stupid girl), and a number of my favorite images are on cds and in other spots like Flickr, but when I wake in the night with cramps I think of lovely images I've taken which went straight from camera to the computer, things I was planning to work with (a lovely series of Sydney walls with gloriously peeling paint, for instance) that I will never see again. FAAAAAARRRKKK!

I know this sounds awful, but I think I'm grieving for the images more than for my lost pregnancy. Or at least, I can't tell the difference at the moment. But life goes on, and at least I still have the camera. And my sunny disposition :)

On the UP side, all your messages have been wonderful and sustaining and I'm touched to get so much affection and well-wishing. Special thanks go to Dean for sending me flowers last weekend, Zoe for sitting on the couch and not laughing at my greasy hair and satin, Fyodor for just being himself, and Laura for sending me the most exquisite hand-made handbag as an early Christmas present.* Plus Speedy, who should send me a proper email because I want to meet her ASAP.

All this niceness is overwhelming! It's as good as a holiday, RLY.


* I haven't got a single bit of tinsel up. There's a couple of Xmas cards from people sitting under dusty teacups, but you'd never think Christmas was so close from looking at our house, inside or out. This is habitual, so don't feel bad for me. I leave Christmas to those who are good at it, like my mother, who claims every year that she's doing nothing, then panics the week before and buys out everything she can see in the local Clints Crazy Warehouse. Every. Year.