07-06-03 @ 11:02 am EDT

Then please pray for the first few pages of Pippin. I swear to God I have found all of my other writing but that. I thought I had the whole story on floppy disk and went looking through those around 9:30 to find it. I got distracted by a disk entitled "Dreams.wps" and had to see what that was. What if it was some lost dreams I had entirely forgotten about? I could add them to my dream journal! But the disk wouldn't work properly. I commenced freaking out and accidentally woke up Ma (it seems like I freak out every Sunday morning and wake her up, for some reason--I can't understand the timing either), convinced my disks were useless. I would have been freaking out more if I hadn't printed out most of my old material ages ago because of Stella's (the old Tandy's) crash. But I had wanted to find the FLOPPY copies rather than the hardcopies so I could save myself a buttload of typing.

It turned out that other disks worked, just not the Dreams.wps one. And a search of my hardcopies revealed it was material I have already typed out, the first few dreams of August 1996. So the disk was useless anyway. So I went looking for Pippin.wps again. I found it...but it was only three kilobytes. Only the first few paragraphs of the story. Where is the rest? It looks like I never even saved it to disk in its entirety. Why not? I thought I saved everything. How could I have somehow overlooked Pippin? :(

So I went looking for the hardcopy. And I finally found it, as well as all the other stuff I had been looking for that I had dug out a while back, except for the first few pages. On Ma's advice I looked for them in the utility room in one of her cabinets and there was some OTHER stuff I had found at the same time as the Pippin printout...but no Pippin. A moment ago I dug in a box beside the computer and found some more composition books I had been looking for, as well as a Writer's Digest I haven't been able to find for ages, I think; and right under the computer monitor itself I found King Kuts Part 5, which I could not find just the other night. But still no Pippin.

So at the moment I am Pippinless and would like to ask that if you believe in any sort of thing that helps people find lost stuff, then try it out, because I really can't figure out where my lost pages are. I'm very cross.

I myself used to go

Tony, Tony, turn around
Help me find what can't be found

because supposedly St. Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of lost things, and that did work sometimes, but I got mad at St. Anthony when he stopped helping me find things and I have been boycotting him ever since (except to dedicate Father Damien's church to him in D Is For Damien--St. Anthony's). Plus praying to saints just seems a rather pagan thing to do (I don't understand Catholicism) and I'm not pagan. But if you want to try it, go ahead.

The story was very derivative of Watership Down and was still unfinished but *I* thought it was okay. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to find the dumb thing. If I can't find a floppy copy you'd think I'd at least deserve to find the hardcopy.

My eyes really hurt so I'll be going now.