Dearly Beloved....

We are gathered here to say our final farewells to my faithful friend, Google Nexus 7, who departed this life in the Eastbourne Rail Station on Sept. 24th, 2013, after an act of gross negligence by the ticket collection machine cut short his vibrant, productive life.  This is necessarily a memorial service, and not a funeral service, since his body has not been recovered and has likely been torn apart by callous, unsavory characters whose hearts were not moved to common decency either by the "If lost, contact..." inscription on the inside of his lovely Dodocase cover my Dad got me last Christmas or the passcode-protected start page with the world's most beautiful boxer on it. We can only pray that the end was quick and that he was not tortured into revealing his owner's emails and personal details. Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Allow me to indulge in a little self pity at the loss of my tablet.  This is, of course, the epitome of First World Problems, but there's a real grief present when we lose precious things stored not in a box, but in a little plastic slab of chips and wires.  In my pre-occupation in obsessively preserving back-ups of the contents of my computer (i.e. my dissertation), I neglected to do the same for my little Nexus 7, who has been a faithful travel companion, even though I 1) used it all the time and 2) had precious photos, recordings, videos, and notes in it. I left my guesthouse at 4:30am for the train station.  I had to travel from Eastbourne (Sussex) to London Victoria, haul across the city to London St. Pancras for a train to Chesterfield (Derby).  I had written my ticket collection code in my Nexus 7, so I know I used it to collect my tickets, but then I proceeded to get hit on by a creepy Indian dude for about 20 minutes before the train thankfully arrived (for whatever reason, I tend to attract unwanted attention from middle-aged Indian men...seriously, it has happened multiple times...ask me about the time I was groped in the dark galley in the middle of the night on an Air India flight to London by a guy who had been flashing an unreciprocated conspiratorial grin at me every time I passed by all night). When I got on the train (very deliberately in a different carriage than my little friend), I promptly fell asleep with my backpack on the seat beside me.  If I didn't leave it in the station, I would probably have hurriedly stuffed it in the outside mesh pocket of my backpack, though it really just looks like a black book.  In any case, it was nowhere to be found by the time I thought to look for it at the end of my first journey.
I could, I suppose, have went back to Eastbourne, but I was on a tight schedule to get to to Chesterfield to pick up my rental car by the time the place closed.  Would have cost me probably 100 pounds in new train tickets plus two nights in a hotel (it was a Saturday, and the car rental place wasn't open again until Monday morning...and I could only get to the place I had already paid to rent for a week by car), so I had to keep going.  I contacted Eastbourne's lost and found and filed a report, but no luck so far.

I'm gonna list the things, mostly silly things, that I lost, and then I'm gonna let it go:

1.  106 completed levels of Candy Crush Saga.  I didn't have it connected to facebook, because I don't like all the friend spamming it requires.  Plus, I had learned how to get more lives by manipulating my Nexus's internal clock. I'm trying to tell myself that this is for the best (it is), since I have no business wasting time and energy on something called Candy Crush Saga.

2. Basically every fiddle tune demonstration I've had at The Old Town School of Folk Music and at The London Fiddle School.  I'd been taking classes at Old Town for about a year and a half before leaving Chicago in April.  Each week, we'd learn a song by ear, and at the end, we'd record it. When I came to London, I took a class at Pete Cooper's London Fiddle School at Cecil Sharpe House in Camden. Luckily I have music to the tunes we learned there, but I'll still miss the demonstrations, since they are slower than other recordings that you can find of the songs.

3. A bunch of grainy videos of me playing various instruments badly, a few grainy videos of me singing well, a bunch of grainy videos of Eblum being cute, a bunch of grainy videos of H (the little boy I babysat for 4 years in Chicago) being cute.

4. Maybe 30 or 40 pictures I took on the Sussex Downs when my other camera ran out of batteries. Maybe another 100 pictures from the last two years.  I don't know what they are of.  Probably just Eblum and H and other random things.

5. An annotated and highlighted copy of my advisor's book.  He gave me the final proofs in PDF form, and I had a program on my Nexus that allowed me to mark it up (highlights, handwritten notes via stylus, underlines, bookmarks).  I had other PDFs marked up on it, but that was definitely the most important.


So there it is.  Not a tragedy.  Just kinda sad.

However, even more sad is the Series of Unfortunate Events that followed this one, including the loss of my non-refundable train tickets to Edinburgh, the death of my 3-month old, very expensive camera that I bought back in June when my other camera (less than 2 years old) died, and the souring of all my clothes when I made the mistake of putting a few items that had not quite dried yet (NOTHING EVER DRIES HERE!) into my luggage for 24 hours.

Okay, really, the pity party is over.  Ya'll have a safe drive home. Jesus take the wheel and all that.

Coming soon to a blog near you:  perfectly cheerful posts about my weeks in Sussex and in Derby.