I lost one of my Pis this week.

It wasn’t anything dramatic. I made a change I didn’t fully test, pulled the power cable too early, and when I plugged it back in, it didn’t know how to be a computer any more.

I thought about recovering it. Spent half an hour trying to mount the old image, staring at the filesystem like it might apoligize. It didn’t.

So I rebuilt it.

Fresh image, new hostname. I kept the scripts I cared about, rewrote the rest. I moved things into their own folders this time, more tidy. Wrote a little backup script, very responsible. Encrypted the archive, for some reason. Left myself a note explaining how to unpack it, just in case I forgot what I was doing.

None of it took very long. But it felt like something.

There’s a rhythm to rebuilding, typign out the same commands you’ve typed a hundred times, knowing exactly what they do, and letting your hands remember things your brain forgot.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a Pi. Or maybe it’s the small rituals that make it feel like you’re still here.