Soon after I announced the loss of my archives, Angel sent me a message on my phone, “Check your email!”
And there, I found a sea of new emails, all from her. And lo and behold, they were my old entries!
As it turns out, she was subscribed to my blog via Google Reader and when she realised that the old entries were still showing up on the Reader, she took it upon herself to forward me all of them. Each and single one of them, one at a time.
By the time I came to realise what she was doing, she had already sent me more than a hundred entries.
We then launched this major rescue operation, me starting with the oldest entries and her working backwards from the newest. It was a process complicated by the fact that some anti-spam mechanism in google stopped us from sending more than 100 emails from our accounts so I had to create another gmail account, and Angel had to use her mother’s.
At the end of the it all, after saving as many as we could - not all could be rescued, because the Reader carried only up to 360 entries - I had to laugh. It was a ridiculously tedious process, but we were in this manic frenzy. So worried, we were, that the Reader might refresh itself and all the old entries be gone again. Imagine sending 360 emails, one at a time - we took about 90 minutes, so that’s one email every 15 seconds. Madness!
As I told Angel - as you must realise by now, she’s not really called Angel - it put a comic spin to my blog tragedy. It didn’t matter how much of my archives could be saved, but picture these two girl, both equally tech-unsavvy, going crazy squirreling away my blog entries in defiance of the Technology Monster. Hilarious!
More importantly, I was touched. Thank you, my friend. ”I love your blog too,” Angel said. Aww. My blog loves you too.