Onward Hoe!

I know I promised you photos of London, and I still intend to post them, but this week has not been so awesome, and I haven't had a chance to do it. I started back to work this week, which has been okay. It's nice to have a schedule again and all, although this week I've hardly been working my normal schedule. But that means I haven't been home that much. The times I have been here, however, have been somewhat less than stellar.

As you know from the last post, our apartment flooded while I was gone. What had happened was that the water heater kind of exploded, so the living room, my bathroom, and part of my bedroom were all quite soggy. The maintenance folks sucked up as much as they could of the water, then placed large, high-powered fans in the living room to blow-dry the floor. We also had a dehumidifier sucking water out of the air and dumping it into my bathtub. So all the furniture was shoved over to one side of the living room. It wasn't a very comfy or convenient place to be. But when I came home from work yesterday, I found that the fans and all had been removed. Praise the Lord.

I don't know if the removal of the fans is related to what happened next, but here comes the sad story. My MacBook. My Buddy. My ultimate hipster accessory. Died.

I had checked my email before going to work that morning (OCD, I know), and when I came home 4 hours later, the screen was frozen. I shut him down, and when I restarted him, Buddy only gave me what amounted to a blank stare. There was a gray screen with a blinking question mark in the center. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with tech support but to no avail. The 4-month-old hard drive had croaked.

Four months?! Are you kidding me? I started to wonder if lemon laws apply to computers. They don't, but luckily Buddy's still under warranty, so the new hard drive and installation were free. Unfortunately, everything is lost. My music, my photos, my writing. All gone.

I still have the back-up disks from my old computer (thanks Jason), so I can get a lot of it back, and I've written to the iTunes people to ask if I might be able to re-download the music I've purchased over the last 4 months. But everything I've written lately and the pictures I took in Wilkesboro and Asheboro are lost forever.

All I can say at this point is that the Mac is really going to have to earn back its place in my heart. I'm skeptical. I'm also going to be a back-up freak from now on. I'll not be burned by the crash of another hard drive.

And on that note, I'm off to bed. I hope all of you have been having a better time of it than I have. Feel free to share sob stories or uplifting ones to make me feel better.