Redeeming Time

      Victory is mine, saith the Doctor uncharacteristically, after months of struggle in trying to reclaim material from two former hard drives that he had presumed all but gone forever.   Not being much of a techno-geek, and previous attempts to access the material proving frustrating failures, yesterday I managed to get back some key work done in the days before what we might now call Roughly-Contemporary Computing.   Yes, now I have back my Master's thesis, my old lecture notes, countless essays and would-be articles (and some actual ones), so much stuff I assumed would take nothing short of a virgin sacrifice to recover.   Good, that, virgins being terrible things to waste, especially for such relatively trivial purposes and in this age when virginity is rarer than academic insight.   So, I've got back my Eisenstein work, my Strand and Stevens and Eliot work, my umpteen-trillion Shakespeare notes; further, so many pictures, so many bits and pieces from the past ten-plus years.   Add to that the fortune of being able, finally, to have a secondary hard-drive on my computer, almost doubling my disk space, and thus allowing me to keep my primary drive neat and tidy, and I'm feeling for the first time in a dog's age like I might be able to get things relatively organized.   Ah, these fragments I had foresworn against my ruins....