Along the way in getting this month's magazine put together, our editor Courtney Halowell, moved onto greener pastures in the editorial world and left us one man down. Amid this loss, Toph and I had picked up the ball and were running toward the goal line with this issue of Baggers without concern until I came back from a very restful holiday weekend to find that my computer had lost its hard drive.
Gone were the last 12 months work, which wasn't that much of an issue since it was already in the pages of past issues of Baggers. What had me at a loss was that all the hard work I had put into making sure I had cool stuff for future issues also vanished, including just about everything I had slated for this issue.
After freaking out for a few days about not getting anything back from the data recovery service and having no boss to cry to, I broke open another can of Monster and got to work at a feverous pace, re-shooting photos, re-writing articles, and riding over to Best Buy for a backup hard drive so this never happens again. One late night when I was up pounding out some pages I was listening to Johnny Cash and I remembered a quote from the legendary Man In Black's biography I had read a few months back... "There's no way around loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and come out the other side."
Jeff G. Holt, Associate Editor