Last night I was in a panic

I was attempting to work on my blog, update it with a pretty little counter, change the layout or add a background pic or something, right? Well, I didn't figure it should be so hard for me since I work in the IT field, and I have html experience and I can read code, blah blah blah. Widgets are a new thing to me, and when I changed my layout last night, I did the backup of the layout prior, and changed it. I accepted the option to delete the widgets because, well, I did back up my data so I figured I would be able to go back to the data and pull the code and add it to the new layout. WRONG!!!!! The widgets somehow disappeared from both the .xml files that I had backed up on different pc's at different times of the day. WTF!!! How could this happen? It should not have happened, but somehow it did. Ugh, I hate computers, why am I in this field? Why do I continue to do this to myself as a hobby?

I had been working on this all day at work - instead of working. Don't hate! I have that liberty in my environment to slack every once in a while. I do my share of work when it's time... right now we are on a holiday freeze. I work for a financial company that deals with debit and credit transactions, banks and ATM's. So, no changes can be made to the production environment while the holiday spending is going on. So, I had time to dedicate to my blog. Obviously with 3 posts yesterday, I had A LOT of time. The posts are easy, its the damn layout that's kicking my ass. So, I attempted to replace the code with the file I had just backed up...widgets just disappeared. I was mad, right? So, I get my work laptop that had an earlier copy and I thought "ah ha, I'm smart because I have a double backup!" Not the case. The widgets never came back. I had to go back and manually reconfigure the damn widgets. I was not happy.

Now I have searched high and low and I have only found one layout so far that works in blogger that does not give me the stupid format error, but it deleted my widgets so now I have to spend more time reading and researching how to get the code for my widgets properly backed up or I have to leave it with the template I'm using now which is buggin' me.

I've read a ton of posts out there that supposedly show you the way to do all this, but maybe I'm just that thick headed that I don't get it. Maybe, itss too easy for my huge brain to comprehend (simple things are hard for geniuses... HA HA HA, yeah right). Maybe someone will feel sorry for my pathetic cry for help and hold my hand through the process until I get what I want - not likely. I'll just do what I do best and continue to bitch about it and figure it out the hard way.