Then there were two

I've been away from the blog for a while. Part of it was due to multiple crashes on my PC. The first crash came from a motherboard failure. A week or more before I got a replacement installed. The second crash was due something around the Master Boot Record (MBR) failing. I ended up having to do a "Windows Repair" to fix it. A weekend to recover from that one. And this past Saturday it died again. Not sure what exactly caused it, but Dell says the error could have been related to a hard drive problem. Except I was using Mirrored drives. And they passed every test we put them through. In the end, I resorted to installing a fresh copy of Windows on a different drive, and pulling the untouched data off the original drives. I'm still not done re-installing everything I need to install and it will likely be next weekend before I'm finished.

The other reason I was gone was due to pure depression and fear. At my day job, I survived Layoff v3.0. But my father didn't. After 8 years of service and being voted Employee Of The Year in 2005, they fired him. And my younger brother had his hours cut back. Since both of them are hourly, they have no recourse and no severance. Of course Layoff v3.0 was neither quick nor clean. We all saw it coming and had to stand there, waiting. For weeks. Pretending we weren't scared and depressed. I couldn't really work out. I certainly couldn't write. This time last year there were five of us working for the same property.

And then there were two.