14:47.

The fish is bloody and I am a walrus.

The sun is shining, the weather about 19 degrees and my hands are cold.

Such irony aside, I had meant to fill you in on the tragic events on my laptop, the injuries (internal) I inflicted on my hard drive unknowingly, specifically on my C drive.

It all begun with a virus, or more specifically, darn those inventions, a worm, I am told.

So what this worm (how apt a name) did was manifest in a pop up window five minutes after I get online to inform me that a certain programme has problems and I have to go offline. In that little, innocuous looking window, a timer watch will start its count down and in 30 seconds time, I will be booted offline.

My roommate, bless her tech-ly soul, identified the worm's blasted name immediately and helped me downloaded something to eradicate it off my less than a month new laptop.

After running that and a few virus scans to be careful, rightfully, it should had been mission accomplished, right?

Nope, wroonggg.

Somehow under the impression that my office software was original - actually, only the OS is - I ran winupdates since it was advisable.

That evening, sated in the knowledge I finally have a net account after about 10 days of randomly borrowing Hannah's account, I was just sitted at my laptop.

Like right now actually. Laptop on small square white Ikea table at the end of my mattress, me cross-legged on the mattress, typing.

I organised all the photos I have taken since the 9th, when I left Singapore, into neat respective folders then thought it wise to start an accounts document to keep tabs of my spending.

So there I was, that fateful night on the 19th last month, at peace and happy while my housemates were chatting gaily away in our room.

Then, a pop up window appeared and could not be cancelled.

I had to restart my laptop twice and when all seemed finally calm again, the whole of my Microsoft Office suite was gone.

Not quite knowing what to do and silently baffled by the suddenness of it all, I tried searching for the programmes and when the search proved futile, I decided to run the system recovery discs that came with the laptop.

I understood its workings to be that it would restore the laptop's everything to an earlier time. This is not entirely incorrect, just that system recovery actually restores the laptop back right to the beginning when you bought it.

I lost my office suite already, that wrong move wiped out my C drive.

Thankfully, my D drive was untouched and I had some of the old documents in my C drive on a CDRW from when I was transferring files from my desktop to my laptop.

When one does something that stupid and wrong, one has to pay a price of course.

What did I lose?

All the photos I took with my loved ones at the airport, at reunion dinner, my only family portrait.

Also, stuff whose loss I can swallow - Albums which I painstakingly transferred, Adobe software, Icq, Nikon View (all software replaceable any how).

I was really completely flabbergasted. Rather surreal, when your laptop takes on a life of its own like that. It wasn't until a day later while talking to the laptop's customer service people that I was told that Office wasn't included in it. That was when I grasped what most likely happened. That when I downloaded winupdates, Microsoft, the corporation, noted the pirated office and somehow installed something that wiped out the whole suite when office was activated.

This is really a tale of how much one person can get things wrong and shoot herself in the foot three times.

First was downloading winupdates when I was using a pirated programme.

Second was running System Recovery without backing up my drives.

And third? Please read on and share my pain.

So in the days that followed after the apocalypse (insignificant when compared to the real coming apocalypse), I was downloading programmes that promises file recovery.

And I. Found. One. That. Shows. Up. Almost. Every. File. I. Lost. After. I. Run. A. Scan. With. It.

Wow, right?

Again, I was flabbergasted since I was operating on minimum hope but doggedly Must-At-Least-Try-ness and perhaps I did not expect to actually find a programme that does so much.

Well, I did but it cost about $50 to buy online.

So, I did the practical thing. Don't buy yet, surf around, try to see if there are any other way to get my hands on it without buying.

Then school started and I didn't had the time to pursue all the retrieving business.

But I was commiting my third mistake throughout the week - I continued to use the laptop, I installed programmes I lost, I downloaded songs.

Why was this a mistake?

Because all of that meant that these new files were being written over the fragile, already-formated-once, files I wanted to retrieve.

So the day before, I tried a couple of programmes a new friend lent me, found them not as good as the original one that gave me hope and reassured me, and I decided to buy the original software.

That's when the folly of my ways came back to haunt me.

This has been a long post already. To summarise on my third wrong, basically, even the programme that could once trawl up almost all the lost files could no longer do so.

Some files, it seems, are gone forever.

I can still see the photos of my loved ones at the airport. That is a day that will never again come. Those captured moments were time which time can never reverse for.

So I grieve.

My heart hurts in a numb manner, my grieve stronger because I'm in this situation because I screwed up.

It was my own hands which pulled the plug. Perhaps that's why the pain is so mute but nevertheless painful.

So I think of the one-linear flow of time and how one can never get back what one lost.

Sigh.

That's why I am a walrus.

I wish I can have those pictures back, so I can look at the faces of people I love, so I can remember in physical form a significant day that will never repeat.

I wish.

It was been some time since my photos were torn away from my heart. The resignation is starting to sink in.

I've got one more chance. I'm going to try to recover the photos from the memory card itself. That needs new programmes and a memory card reader and lots of prayer.

The memory card, a CompactFlash, has been overwritten on about three or four times or perhaps even five before.

Be still my soul.

It's strange but I can actually say I have learnt very valuable lessons. I suppose when a lesson is this costly, you learn faster.

And I can give thanks because God - though I don't understand why this happened and if there are reasons - has showed me the right programmes to use and given me people who can aid in the process.

For now, it still hurts but you never know.

Let's try with the memory card.

And to end, today is the first day of Autumn.