"This is as bad as anything I've ever seen." -- tech guy at Milwaukee PC

Words like, "fried" "shorted out" and "melted" in reference to the inside workings of my PC. The vital informational phrase of the day?

"Packed with dust."

He is going to try some techie voodoo and see if he can retrieve the pictures, however, he was not delivering any false hope about it.

Do you know how many days of fruitless good intentions were involved in not getting those pictres backed up? I even had calendar days marked for the occasions (because more than one day of disk burning here -- in a mom's world where you have to feed people and such). I had a lot of it done, but the final bit...

Rich thought he had done it on the external hard drive, but he missed a big chunk and those are the pictures I've been meaning to get to for, oh, I don't know, an embarrassing, inexcusable -- too bad, so sad you lost your pictures dumbass -- amount of time.