The "Heartbroken, Because Of Stupidity" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Just pushed on my mouse and wiped out my entire queue of photographs that have been on my computer since I bought it in December of 2009.  Six years disappeared with the touch of my finger.  Photos from perhaps a dozen Caribbean islands and photos from maybe two dozen family birthday parties.  Did I plan to have it happen?  NO!  Does it matter that it happened?  Probably not. For years I have been documenting vacations, family get-togethers, and taking photos for my own enjoyment and to use on my blog which I began seven years ago.  After every vacation I would place all the photos onto a disc or two and store them in a notebook.  Same for family photos which I would save onto a disc a few times a year.  Photos I took just for fun or for my blog I just left on the computer until I decided to trash them.  Now, that is where I ran into trouble it seems.  Every time I would trash a vacation or family group of photos after saving them to a disc, I slid them into my iPhoto trash can.  I saw that there was a tab where I could empty the trash, but it never was highlighted so I just assumed that the photos were just going away.  At times I amaze myself with how little I really know about my computer.  Recently I bought a Seagate Backup Drive at the recommendation of my niece's husband who told me that CD's do have a life expectancy and it was possible that sometime in the future I may lose the content of the discs.  Not wanting that to happen, I bought the backup drive.  After getting help to attach the drive, I began the task of putting close to 100 discs onto the drive.  I spent hour after hour copying the content to the desktop and then to the drive, since that was the only way I could figure out how to do it.  I am almost finished, but I reached a point where a message appeared on my screen telling me that my desktop file was almost out of space and did I want to do anything about it.  I chose not to do anything until a final note told me I had to quit since the disc was full, or something similar to that.  Then I read the note one more time and realized that I was being told that my iPhoto program was out of space, since my trash was taking up all the room necessary to continue.  After hitting a few different buttons I finally realized that the "Empty Trash" was highlighted.  So ….. I hit it!  Note popped up asking me if I really wanted to empty the trash since I would erase everything and never get any of it back.  My finger got ahead of my brain and before I knew it I was permanently erasing 87,791 photographs from iPhoto.  Do you have any idea how many that is?  For me it's six years of photos.  I pushed the shutter release button almost 88,000 times in the past six years on my DSLR and now they are …. well, gone.  And, do you have any idea how long that takes to discard all those photos?  I actually watched 15 minutes of the evening news, came back and the little colored circle was still spinning.  Finally after I ate supper I checked and it had stopped and my photos were gone.  I was heartbroken!!  I did manage to take the SD Card from my camera and reload the past couple of days photos into iPhoto, but the rest were gone.  Then I thought, I have all the CDs and can use them to retrieve photos that are important.  But, the photos I had taken since Christmas to be used for stories I wanted to write for my blog are permanently gone.  So now what?  Well I guess I don't have any for this story!!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.