Data corruption and seasonal changes

 

The second week of my residency has thrust me into change: the expected and the unexpected, and I have a feeling it isn't over yet. The seasonal time change here in the EU has meant more of a sudden shift than I'd expected. The long and warm days in southern Italy over the past two weeks has been a welcome contrast to the damp early autumn of the UK when I left. But with the 'falling back' of time over the weekend, the tiny village where I am staying saw booming thunderstorms, an absolute deluge of rain, and two mini power cuts in the house where I'm staying.

Once I adjusted to the rattling, snarling sky, and spent time considering the river of water that was sluicing rapidly down the stone alleyway between my house and the library-work-space where I've been spending my daylight hours, I made the wet trek up the hill to touch base with books and the alternative swell of light coming through the high windows of Il Museo. But when I opened the front door, I encountered a flood: underneath library shelves, the tables, and swirling round the electrical extension I'd just set up the day before. A couple of hours later and one of the curators to the rescue and all was dry and workable again.

The following morning I sat down at my laptop to put the finishing touches on a book proposal that I'd been working on during the previous week, and to finally back up my files on cloud storage (a step too many during my migraine battle). Instead, I found myself confronted with an alert from my usb drive to a corruption in the files. Do you want to fix this? I was prompted, yes, of course. And after the fix: there I was, midday Tuesday with a flash drive wiped of data--an entire week of outlining chapters, summarising arguments, attempting keywords; gone. 

Frantic phone calls to my IT-fluent partner, phone calls with IT at work, running quick fix software and 24 hours later I was exactly nowhere: no data recovered except for one measly pdf that I could've re-downloaded anyway. An emergency whatsapp message to my fellow magic writing colleagues and they bestowed the best / least wanted advice: step back, take a break, take a day or two off. Argh!

And so Wednesday morning found me ambling the 1.5 miles down the mountain to catch the bus into the bigger town 12km away, for some nice bread and pastries I was hoping. After a long hour of shifting around at the village bus stop while locals walked past with amused looks and a 'Buondi' or a 'Ciao', I gave up waiting and composed a question about bus times via my phone's translation app then breached the doorway of the nearest shop--Luigi's Macelleria.

A five minute, hilarious but effective, half-mimed conversation later and the woman behind the counter had me sorted out. And what I understood is this: when the time change happens, the bus times change with it. What? Could this information be right? She assured me it was with this note:

I promptly caffeinated myself then trudged the long hill back to the house while silently cursing time changes and usb drives, more determined than ever to get to town, but knowing I'd have to wait and try again the next day. 

Long story short, I made it on the 10:30am bus as instructed--the bus that arrived going in the opposite direction and up the mountain at 10:30am and which did a loop and came back to where I was waiting for a 10:50 collection. By which time I'd made friends with an elderly woman who spoke no English yet who wanted to read me a letter she was writing (in Italian) so I could help her edit it (ha!). After connecting over an exchange that neither of us understood, she grabbed me by the forearm and hoisted me onto the bus with her, announcing to the driver: only English English her. But the rest of the day was a good rest, as needed. And the rest of week 2...was re-writing the book proposal.