09. june: oh, those rotten apples!

You may or may not have noticed my absence during the past week. If you did, and missed me, I apologize profusely. If not, well...I'm really hurt.

That said, perhaps I should explain where I was -- I was right here, of course! No fancy vacations, no trips for work and no bunkering down in the kitchen for me...unfortunately. I have been cooking and baking, as usual, the results of which will be keeping this site busy for a bit, but that was not what kept me away. On Wednesday, all of a sudden, my hard drive in my laptop died. Ka-put. With no warning (other than it's general glitchiness recently, which now, in hindsight WAS my warning), it had a major infarct and without the general pomp and circumstance of an all-out explosion, it quietly imploded, leaving me staring at it, wondering what to do.

I was devastated. It was like a death in the family, in some ways and it took me a while and some serious introspection (meaning that I kept turning it off and on and off and on again, trying to fool it into working) to actually accept the fact that it was gone. Luckily I have a brother with enough knowledge of Macs that he could definitively say, "um, check with Marc...he'll be able to help you", and even luckily-er (?) I have a nice, generous brother-in-law("Marc") who happens to repair and help people with their Macs for a living. A great guy to know, especially when I know nothing about what goes on beneath my keyboard...and have zero desire to ever find out.

Toting my dead laptop and some hope and edible incentive I arrived at his office on Thursday morning. Leaving my computer there was very hard for me, but trusting his good-natured smile and his great knowledge of all things Apple, I left -- but not before leaving a rather generous slice of home-made Banana-Strawberry-Nut Bread on his desk for him to enjoy.

After many days of worry and some nail biting, a few scary telephone calls (Marc: "did your drive always run white-hot?", and later, Marc: "this makes me wonder if maybe it's the logi-board" Me: "...um, what the HELL is a logi-board??!") and some serious freaking out on my part, Marc gave me back my laptop, new hard drive installed, everything working (knock on cutting board, touch metal mixing bowl, pray to the computer and food Gods). I promised to bring him a while loaf of the banana bread this week sometime that I had already given him a sample of and went on my way, giddily smiling and oh-so-happy to have finally gotten my life back.

One problem: the back-up I had done when things started their downward spiral about a month ago was on a drive belonging to my brother. What to do, what to do? I've managed to salvage my site files directly from the internet and most of my other stuff from said drive, which now sits on my coffee table, giving me dirty looks and wondering when I am going to return it to its rightful owner.

I'm still sort of working semi-blinded here...so, if there are links or glitches I am sorry...feel free to let me know!