Two things hit the wall this week.

1. The primary hard drive on the Mac that handles the bulk of my video and photography work;
2. And me.

The hard drive crashed on Monday — the day before the election, forcing me to turn to a Windows-based PC and a trial copy of Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5 to edit an Election Day video that appeared on the Floyd Press web site.

I keep multiple backups of all my photo and video files so nothing was lost there but I had to replace the hard drive, install the latest version of Mac’s OS X that still supports a G5 Power PC and then reinstall all the software that supports my photographic and video work: Primarily Adobe Photoshop and Apples’ Final Cut Pro Studio.

Reinstalling took all of the week and the hard drives are still churning away with migration of the thousands of video and image files.  I took the opportunity to upgrade some software that needed updates.  But I had to do all this around a 16-hour day covering the election and a long board of supervisors meeting on Wednesday.

And then I woke up Thursday morning with fever, a sore throat and a general weakness that signals exhaustion — something that crops up from time to time when I push myself too hard. I know the symptoms all too well.  I’ve running at full tilt for the last several weeks and it finally caught up with me.

Spent most of Friday in and out of bed, working — when I could — on restoration of the Mac and all its files.  Today, I was due to head north to shoot photos and video of the State Cross Country Championships at Great Meadow just outside the Plains in Northern Virginia but I’m just too weak to make the journey.

Another couple of days of taking it easy and I should be back up to speed.