Everybody has bad days.  You know the kind, when nothing seems to go right, and each blow as the day wears on drags you closer and closer to tearing your hair out.  Well…my computer, filled with its dozens of children stories and full length novels, crashed, crashed, crashed this week.

At 3am it popped out of nowhere, the blue screen from hell, and nothing I did would make it leave.  Was everything, everything I’d ever written lost forever?  Unable to do anything but freak out, I decided waking my husband from his much deserved sleep was the only option.  He couldn’t fix it either!  Right about now the bile had risen right to the back of my throat.  If my perfect, superhuman husband, couldn’t fix it who could?

My husband pulled my hyperventilating self back to bed and forced me to lie down.  “Just go to sleep.  It’s not going anywhere, and you’ll be able to think clearer once you calm down.”

Psk, I thought, but eventually my shuddering body and tears gave way to sleep.  When I woke a few hours later an idea came to mind, it was something I had been shown once by a tech geek but had never tried.  It worked!  The sneaky back door on the computer allowed me enough access to extract all of my stories.  Yep, the computer is a complete loss, but I can breathe knowing I haven’t lost everything.

So what did I learn from all of this?  When the going gets tough, take a nap.  Okay, so it wasn’t necessarily the nap that made everything better, but sometimes the only thing you can do for those bad days is step away. A perspective filled with clarity is difficult to acheive in the heat of the moment.  And now, I’m loving the library until my new computer comes.