Meet Scarlett. This tiny 7cm x 11cm external HD has 500 GBs and I was way overdue for a backup. Of course, I have this other LaCie HD that I bought almost three years ago… well, I have it somewhere.

Something very weird has been going on here with things we have unpacked and know we have held in our hands and that are now nowhere to be found. First it was Nog’s hair trimmer. He’d used it to trim his beard but we couldn’t do a haircut because it was low on juice and he couldn’t find the charger. Then he found the charger and – you guessed it – now can’t find the trimmer. Last week I saw the LaCie HD on the living room table. This morning I found the USB cable, but no HD. And yesterday a DVD I’d been meaning to watch is no longer, well, anywhere. It’s crazy.

And so, I was supposed to get together yesterday with the fearless Ana, who helped me move, to help her set up a blog and other social media stuff. But she got in touch to say her laptop had collapsed and she had to take it to computer hospital. And then she said – “thank goodness everything is backed up” – and I felt a chill down my spine. Shadow hasn’t been backed up since … well, I can’t remember. Which sent me on a massive house search for my HD, which then sent me over to FNAC to buy this new gadget. Well, as Mudhooks has pointed out before, it’s prudent to have back-up copies on more than one external HD, and my old one was actually too small. So now that I have this new back-up HD I’m sure my old one will turn up some time today.

In other news, my iPod – which has been missing in action since The Move – has finally been found! In fact, it was in the very place I thought I’d put it (my laptop bag), which I checked about a gazillion times these past three weeks, but then suddenly it was there! Perhaps the same thing will happen with all the other mysteriously missing articles. I suspect Loki…