Self Sabotage

Well, I finally did it. Lost a scene I'd written because I was hasty and careless. Yesterday I took the laptop to a Moxie Java and used it to reorganize Chapters 10 through 20. The trouble was, I'd already done a lot of that work on the PC at home and didn't realize it, so I ended up doing the same thing twice for no good reason. There was some benefit to it because I also made a few notes in the various chapters on the laptop that I didn't have on the desktop PC, and further refined my reorganization of 10 - 20. But my big stupid mistake came after I'd started to transfer the newly updated files from the laptop to the PC. I only had to change a few of them, and Chapter Ten on the PC contained a partial scene that the laptop did not. I thought I was being careful to transfer only things that had changed substantially on the laptop and improved the chapters in question. Then I realized that I'd overwritten the PC's Chapter Ten with the laptop's Chapter Ten--and in the process lost the partial scene that had been on the PC. Gone forever--no way to get it back. I'll never know whether the partial scene was particularly good or not, because it had been a little while since I'd read it through--but good or bad, it's gone forever. Now instead of polishing and finishing it, I have to rewrite it completely. They say that you can always fix bad writing, but you can't fix a blank page. Don't I know it! Sheesh.

Oh, and to add injury to insult, I fell asleep in the office's comfy armchair while I was waiting for a downloaded program to supposedly recover my overwritten files (starts the process but won't finish unless you buy it--very frustrating little exercise in doomed hope). Then I woke up suddenly with a sharp pain in my left big toe. Seems I'd kicked out in my sleep and whacked the toe on a fan which was on the floor in front of the chair. Hurt like a you-know-what, but didn't turn purple, so I guess it's not broken. But I've been limping all day because it hurts when I try to move it much or put any weight on it. I can walk normally, but at about a quarter of normal speed.

Apparently, I am my own worst enemy.