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I'm going to Montreal tomorrow. This is not The Big Announcement that will come when I move there again. I'm just visiting. It sure feels odd to say that I'm "visiting" in the apartment I lived in for almost three years...

Anyway, my mom and her family are going in the area for some family stuff, and they'll drop me off at my apartment, where my two roommates still live. I'll be spending the weekend and the beginning of next week there.

I don't really have big plans. I'll be seeing some friends I haven't seen for a while, doing some shopping and hopefully walking in the Old Harbor. And eating at some restaurant! I have a serious rage for Asian food right now. If you ask for an Asian restaurant here, you'll be redirected at those pseudo-Chinese restaurants that serve fried rice, chicken balls, egg rolls and chicken wings.

I don't speak about my grandfather much. I don't really visit him much either. It's not that I don't like him. I believe I know why now, though. It's because I feel so goddamn uneasy.

My grandfather loves his grandchildren. It's a good thing, because he does have 16 grandchildren and and 12 great-grandchildren. He is, however, a Roman Catholic. That, in itself, wouldn't be a problem. There are millions of Catholics in the world, and I don't feel this unease around them. The problem is that he is a very, very conservative Catholic.

In case you haven't noticed, I am not only atheist, but I am rather liberal in my views. Not that it's hard to be more liberal than him. He has often reproached some of his children to have have kids before marriage, that sort of thing.

He also believes that people who are not Roman Catholics will burn in hell. It doesn't matter if you are a wonderful, kind, generous person. If you are not Catholic, it's hell for you (I have the sudden urge of saying "There will be no cake for you"). It doesn't matter if you were born in 15th century South America, before Incas met Europeans for the first time. Were you Catholic? No? Well, you know what's waiting for you after death.

I don't believe in an afterlife, but it still is uneasy to be around a man who believes your wicked ways are dooming you to an eternity of pain and suffering.

Because it doesn't end there. Just that, I could live with. I just would avoid talking about religion. And God. And death. And Sundays.

My grandfather also believes that women shouldn't wear pants, shouldn't have jobs and should spend their time at home, taking care of children and meals for their husband. Needless to say that doesn't agree with me.

And then, of course, remember how I am bisexual? Well, I never heard my grandfather talk about homosexuality and I certainly never want to. Should I get myself a nice girlfriend, I can't bring her at my grandparents', or even mention her. I don't even dare imagining what he would do if he were to learn of my orientation.

In brief, I live with an undeniable fear of him. He doesn't know it, but he is disgusted by everything I stand for and am. Atheism is a belief and a choice. Bisexuality just is. I don't have a problem with my own orientation and it generally isn't of other people's business. It is sad, though, to be unable to share your love stories with your family members.

Lately, when browsing fanlistings, I often come across a warning from Avast that the website I'm visiting is infected. I wondered what it was, and saw that more than one domain seemed to be infected. I came across this thread over at TFL Boards, explaining what's going on. In brief: if you use Adobe Reader to open PDF files, make sure to upgrade to the latest version. Actually, the the problem was discovered over 2 months ago. You can read more on the security flaw and its patch.

When I formatted my computer, I said I made a back up of everything. Apparently, that was not true. I forgot the single most important folder: the one containing my texts. All lost. This left me no less than devastated.

At first I could do nothing but cry, then I thought about how I had read on programs that can recover deleted files, including after a complete formatting. I tried two of these. The first one, Handy Recovery, is unfortunately a paying program. This means that, unless I pay $49, I can only use it for 30 days and recover 1 file per day. Well, I had more than 30 files to recover, and I would have died of excessive anxiety if I had had to wait 30 days before completing the recovery.

So I looked for another program, and found Recuva. I am going to hump it! It was able to recover many of my files, although some remain lost forever. I'm a bit of an emotional rollercoaster right now. On one hand, not all my files are lost. On the other hand, I did lose some I would have loved to still have.

I have an old backup on a CD here, but, well, it is old. It doesn't have any of the things I have written since moving to Montreal, actually. I always was too lazy to make backups.

So, I have lost some poems, but those should be elsewhere too, as I published many online. If they aren't online anymore, they could be in database backups (I still have those).

I have lost some fiction. Nothing completed, but still starts I would have loved to keep! I lost one I was particularly attached to, but none of my Big Important Novels. My poor babies

I have lost some Titanic fan fiction! I think I haven't lost any I have written, but I had a nice collection of fan fiction from other people, and it's partially lost.

I have lost some of the work I have made on a video game. I haven't done designs, coding or anything, just concepts and ideas. Well, some of the things are intact, but some of the files were lost.

Finally, a bit of advice if this ever happens to you. First of all, keep in mind that when you delete a file, you aren't really "deleting" it. You are merely telling your OS that the space occupied by this file is free for use, and that there is no longer a file on whatever address it was assigned.

Second, try not to use your computer for anything but the recovery. Shut down IM programs, browsers, text editors, etc. Any program that is running can be creating files (temporary or permanent), and these files could just happen to overwrite your beloved lost ones.

Third, the recovery program will ask you where you want to put the recovered files. It is really important to avoid putting them on the disc where the files were originally. Why? For the same reason as number two: some of the recovered files could overwrite the lost files! You can use a USB storage drive or an external drive.

When a file has been overwritten, the program will still recover it, and save it under its original name. When you open it, however, it will not be the file you thought. My files were all text files (mostly in the .odt and .doc formats), and some of them read as code for software, or characters like #.

That said, I have to catch up on my work. I spent the last 24 hours or so doing just recovery and crying, so I got a bit of catchup to do.