Ohhhh, what would I do without you?

Soooo...it's been a while since I've updated our blog. Not by choice but because exactly two weeks ago my computer crashed from a HORRIBLE virus. It all started one afternoon when I was on the Internet browsing around, when one of my boys interrupted me for something so I got up and left the Internet on while I walked away for a few minutes. When I got back from appeasing my child, there were all these pop-ups on the screen. Now, I NEVER get pop-ups so I immediatly broke into a cold sweat. "Mal ware this" and "Mal ware that." I quickly x'd out of them and kept on browsing. The pop ups kept coming up, about every 5 minutes or so. I was starting to worry a little, was this the beginning of the end for my old friend. I decided to just turn off the computer and walk-away.
Through out the rest of the afternoon, I would come back to my computer, turn it on, click around and the pop ups kept coming more and more frequently. So that was it, I decided I better just turn it off and walk away. I left my computer alone for a full 12 hours, which is a long time for me.
The next morning, with my fingers crossed, I turned my computer back on. Immediately the pop-up's were there along with some new "distasteful" icons that had invaded my desktop...thank goodness they were soooo small I couldn't really tell what they were, I only knew they weren't good by the names that were under them. :( Before I could do anything about either the pop-ups or the icons, my computer froze up for good. The eye twitching had begun.
So there I was with my dinosaur of a computer that had been invaded by a virus. My dinosaur of a computer that had 5 years of photos on it, all my real estate files, all my 300 email contacts for work and church, all of my hundreds of vinyl files and thousands of vinyl fonts. None of which were backed up in any way and none of which I could access any longer. It was a sad, sad day. RJ thought I was going to have a mental break. Quite honestly, so did I.
That day, a nice man came over and did get most of the virus off. However, the virus had completely fried my Windows XP operating system so even though the virus was 98% gone, I could no longer use my computer. I didn't know what to do???
Come to find out that a friend we go to church with is a total computer guru. He is a computer programmer by trade. RJ asked him if he could help us out and try to at least save the data from this computer so I wouldn't have lost EVERYTHING!!! He kindly said that he would take a look at it and see what he could do. He kept our computer for about a week and a half. YES, I went without a computer for a little over a week and a half and no one was more impressed by this than I was :)
After much labor, patience and finagling on our friends part, my computer is restored. I have EVERYTHING back...Really EVERYTHING!!! I didn't lose one single file, image, data bite, whatever. It's all back on my computer and running like a dream. What a blessing in my life to find someone who could repair my computer and actually knew what he was doing. I am also so blessed that he didn't give up on my dinosaur. He worked and worked on it till my computer was back up and running. I feel sooooo blessed!!!
Needless to say, I now own a external hard drive which I have used to back up all my files on my computer. I also have installed a great anti-virus software which scans my computer consistently for virus invaders. Here's hoping that it doesn't happen again any time soon. What did I ever do before I worked from home on this computer??