What short moments we shared.

Before the sun pulled itself above the horizon on this very day, I stepped outside to the patio.

The lamentations of a feline called out into the morning hours with a sense of loneliness and lamentation, a frightened cry cast upon the cool air.

This new cat I had never seen before, his tortoiseshell coat calico in nature, a ginger tabby painted with black and white such that I knew he was sterile from the moment of birth.

And oh what a marvelous personality!  Loving, talkative, in need of human companionship, lost and alone.

Had he been cast out like so many others at White Rock Lake?  Or had he simply lost his way?

He spoke to me within seconds of seeing me, the voice of a predator who needs humans ringing in my ears as he wept his sorrow and pleaded his case.

I returned the attention, of course, gave him affection and food and water.

When finally the light of day spilled upon the world, I beheld his beauty as though I had never witnessed such majesty before.  A divine cat he was, a spectacle of nature painted with brushes diverse and artistic.

His personality likewise seemed made of nature’s best.

But he was declawed, at least in front, and he was sterilized, a need nature saw fit to address before he was born (male calicoes are genetically sterile, hence their rarity) and that his previous “owners” saw fit to endorse with cutting.

I spent quite some time with him over the course of hours.  He soaked up every minute of it, kissed me on the nose, gave me love bites, showed me the kind of attention one only finds in animals who love people.

And when I rushed out to run my errands and tend my chores?

I returned to find him dead, his body a castaway run over in the street outside my home, his ebullient persona left on cold concrete to mark the passing of a life too soon lost, an emotional being too wonderful to be misplaced.

I have seven cats.  What could I have done?

It only took an hour for me to witness the best and worst this one life might experience.

And I will never forgive myself…

In the very early morning hours yesterday, this site and many others suffered from a catastrophic hardware problem.

Rather, they succumbed to the finality of a problem that had been ongoing for quite some time.

Failing drive arrays be damned, the easiest way to explain it is to say this: The data storage failed after months of serving up increasingly bad results bundled in happy little boxes of completeness.

What that means is that all data on the server was lost.

Including this site amongst many others.

While I run regular backups of all the server’s information, this one apparently lied for quite some time by returning corruption wrapped up in good packets.

But I’m no technological fool.

Thankfully, when the entire server went belly-up yesterday, I had reliable information that allowed me to restore 99% of what was lost.

It’s that 1% that vexes me, as it’s that 1% that had been backed up for some time with corrupt data neatly packaged in unremarkable bits and bytes.

Still, it could have been worse.

Needless to say, this and many other sites are functioning at near-normal standards.  But there are hiccups and issues that must be addressed.

So I apologize for the outage yesterday while a new server was brought online and information restored.  I also apologize for any hiccups with this site that remain ongoing; they’ll be dealt with accordingly.

And while the old server had its limitations, the new one I purchased to replace it intentionally includes expanded capabilities that will allow me to do both offline and online backups at regular intervals.

Not that that means much to the layman.  But it means a great deal to me.

As for posts, I will get back to them as quickly as possible, but for now my focus is fixed in other directions—like returning full service to paying customers, returning all accounts to their pre-crash state, and ensuring this site finds its way back to functionality.

Various hiccups will be seen here over the next few days while I uninstall and reinstall services and systems, patches and code, and hopefully resolve the many yet minor outstanding problems resulting from yesterday’s crash.