I had spent the better part of three days scanning, editing, lightening, darkening, adjusting, cropping and resizing more than four dozen photos one at a time from two concerts I've been to in the last month. I had been so excited that I was able to adjust the colors from the awful black tint that everything that is scanned acquires to a very good looking lightened hue.

So I realize that the computer I'm editing these on has no cd burner, so I set about copying the files to a different computer by using the old fashioned method of dragging them onto a floppy disk and then carrying them into the other computer. Nevermind the fact that I didn't have to do this. The pictures were all going online and I could have just uploaded them from the antique computer.

My first mistake was cutting the photos and pasting them. I should have copied and pasted. Because you see, once I finally found a dusty old disk that wasn't sticking its tongue at me whenever I tried to add files to it, and that seemed to be working fine, it would give me a message that I needed to format it whenever I popped it back into the computer.

I had added pictures to two disks. I tried the other. "Format me," it told me accompanied by an error sound.

All of that work had gone down the drain. I couldn't recover the files on two of the computers. I decided to try the computer my mom was using, and lo and behold the photos came up. Excited, I selected them, copied them and hit paste, thinking my woes were over.

The files wouldn't copy. They were damaged.

I tried the other disk, and nothing came up. Just the formatting error.

As a last resort, I climbed over boxes, clothes, old magazines and sewing machines and into what sometimes is my sister's room to use the computer that is so old, it still has a Napster icon on the desktop.

I placed the first disk in. It read the files. I copied a few over. They copied onto the desktop. I thought my problem was solved until I the files stopped copying altogether. In all I was able to grab 6 of the 28 photos. The other disk was about the same. I managed 5 of 22. Having a secure disk in hand, I copied and pasted the few files I could grab onto it and safely placed them on all three of the other computers just to be safe.

I don't know what frustrates me more. The fact that I spent days getting these photos to look just right only to lose them with the click of a mouse or the fact that every disk and memory stick I've placed in a computer in the past ten days has asked me to format it before and after I've stored stuff on it.

Back to the editing table. I'm hoping to get a summer worth of concert pictures online by Monday.

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