I totally screwed up...

I've been reading up on how to perfect my photography. Yes, I am a perfectionists when it comes to my photography work. I've always been my worst critic. I see good but the worse is always what I notice first. SO, I went out two weeks ago and found this book by Bryan Peterson... Understanding Digital Photography. It's a great book- I must admit. I have now started shooting ALL my photos in RAW format... (for those that know what I mean when I say RAW- GREAT! If you have no clue- sorry it's just too much to explain here...) anyway- I highly recommend it to all you DSLR shooters out there that know what I'm talking about when I say shoot in RAW format. It is amazing!
I went to C's baseball game with all new techniques I wanted to use that I'd learned from this book. I came home and uploaded all the photos- 70 something!. I post precessed all the keepers and prepared them in a jpeg file format to upload for the web to share here with you all. I was using Picassa. Well, this is where I screwed up... I opened Picassa- found my folder with my new images (jpegs and RAW files) and thought I was creating a new folder in Picassa. After reading about Picassa- it doesn't create folders... it just SCANS your hard drive folders and makes them look all organized in Picassa... When I thought I was creating this new folder in Picassa I seen that I had both RAW and jpeg files there. I didn't want to remove the RAW files so I just deleted all the images. Remember I thought I'd created a new folder in Picassa for these images. It wasn't until I went to my hard drive to create a new folder to copy my jpeg files into for Picassa and realized that I'd deleted all the images from my hard drive. Yes, I deleted all the files on my hard drive thinking I was just deleting a newly created folder in Picassa. These files aren't on my hard drive in my pc either... these are on an external hard drive that I use just for my photos. I have about 8000 and still adding daily- so an external hard drive is despreately needed. I'm frantically searching a way to get back those files I deleted from my external hard drive. I looked in my recycle bin but they're nowhere to be found.. unless they're right there in front of me...
This isn't the worse that's ever happened to me though- I have once lost every single photo that I've ever had on my hard drive- that's what prompted me to get an external drive. This great friend in Auburn was able to recover every single photo. How he did it- I have no clue but to this day I could still kiss that man on the forehead...
Could this happen to me today b/c I FINALLY got a little "sassy" about my work and bragged about how good I am to a friend when she called me up today? What's wrong with finally finding a little pride in my work? Like I said I am my worse critic so it takes a lot for me to say... "I'm good!" These photos are the bomb too... I caught shots of the plays like I've always dreamed... FROZEN IN TIME! I want my images back! So, anyone that had a desire to read all of this post know how they can help me now? I still haven't gotten those files back...