I seem to be on a string a borken bits and pieces in my life. Perhaps God is showing me that I've gotten too comfortable with my material things. Or I'm just hitting a bunch of random coincidences. I alluded to it in this entry, but here is a full story.


Things begin to break
It all started months ago, back in May when my camera broke. Specifically I noticed it at the Cinco de Mayo party. It would no longer show anything on the little screen when pointed at an object. But it would show old pictures. Pictures taken were just black images. From this I concluded that the digital capture part (lens perhaps?) wasn't working and it probably wasn't worth it to try to fix a four year-old camera anyway. I thought about replacing it, read and looked at different cameras, and just kept putting it off.

Fast forward to August and I'm getting ready to go to Phoenix. (Week of the 12th) Monday, my laptop stops working. Period. There are random blue screens, but no goodness. I did get one reboot in goodness and a partial backup of my pictures and my documents, but not my music. Then nothing. I'm really really not happy especially as my warranty had expired two weeks before. I pretty much assume my computer is dead and start looking at cute little macbooks. (For various reasons I will never buy a dell again and I'm ready to go mac and not look back!) I take my computer in to a computer repair place (not the evil blue and yellow store) to see if they can fix it. I have little hope; mainly I just want them to try to get the backup done on the external hard drive I borrowed from my parents. Mentally I'm coaching myself to spend $1000 on a new macbook, and rearranging my budget. At this point, I schedule myself to go along on my mother's trip to Seattle to see my sister. My sister's husband is awesome at macs (he actually works in the mac department of microsoft) and could help me oodles.

Tuesday, I'm at work and then some meetings. When I'm done, I have a voicemail from my roommate (and three other people). I listen to the other voicemails and return calls and my roommate's comes up just as I'm turning into the drive. (Seriously I never get called that much, it was a weird day.) I figure I'm about to see her, so I don't listen. Apparently our a/c was out. That was during a heat wave, the hottest week of the year, we were hitting triple digits every day with high humidity. She's already decided to go to her parents. I start making a mental list of people I know who will take me and my cat (can't leave her in the sweltering house alone) in at 9:30 at night. Fortunately my parents are (obviously) first on that list, and live three miles away. I throw things in a bag, and head over there.

Wednesday, I went to the Harry and the Potters concert with jvgymnast which deserves its own entry. When I got done with that, there was another few voicemails. One from my roommate. The repairman had come and fixed our a/c. Huzzah! However our entire neighborhood (six block radius) had no power, hadn't had power for an hour or two, and while there were trucks out there from the power company, had no guarantee of power soon. No power effectively means no a/c. A quick call to my parents lets them know that they will still be keeping the cat and I'll be sleeping there again.

Things begin to get fixed
Thursday morning, I run back to place to pack (power and a/c restored) but leave my parents with the cat. I take off for Phoenix. I get one phone call when I'm on the plane (retrieved after landing) about my laptop from the computer people. Things may not be hopeless, and I leave a return message.

Friday, I get a remarkable amount of calls. Very few people ever call me unless apparently I'm unreachable. I'm up in the mountains, limited phone reception, not sitting by my phone, and it is ringing off the hook. Some of the calls are from the a/c repair people (there had only been a temporary fix and now they had the part for the permanent fix) wanting me to meet them at the house. I repeatedly reminded them to call my roommate. The people from the computer store call me. I have a hard disk drive failure. Actually that is not that expensive to fix (below $400 which is my line for fix vs replace) and I can buy a bigger hard drive to put in. They also reassure me that they backed up onto the external hard drive (a service I paid for), so I authorize them to put in the new hard drive, decline to have them reload anything, and authorize my father to pick it up as I'm out of town.

I pick up my laptop from my parents when I get back from Phoenix. I reload various things, including windows XP and a version of Office my mother bought quite a while ago, forgot about, and never loaded on a single computer. So I got lucky and didn't have to buy any replacement software. It takes forever to go to dell and get all the drivers to make my laptop work and to reload all the stuff so it mostly works like before. (By forever I mean a week with me fiddling with it every day). Even now, I occasionally find stuff that has to be reloaded (mainly plugins like flash).

This is all good news, even though I'd gotten used to the idea of having that macbook and was a little disappointed, but happy not to spend the money. However, the backup on the external hard drive did not go as planned. I don't know if the computer store screwed up, or my drive was too corrupted. All of my folders are there with nothing in them. I open the folder for all my graduate work and it shows sub folders for each class. I open a class folder and completely empty! Same thing with my photos. It shows folders for each year. Inside each year it has folders such as "easter" and "chicago" with nothing in those subfolders! A few folders had stuff, but 98% did not. Grr! I would have been beyond upset and raging at the computer store had I not had all of those on my CDs. The only thing I didn't have on my CDs was my music. And that was the one thing that was all there on the external drive. When I reloaded it into itunes and synced my ipod there were 42 songs that had been lost. That was most likely due to the hard drive failures. 7 of those were purchased songs and I reclaimed them from the version on my ipod. The others I can reload from CDs.


All in all I came out of the laptop thing relatively unscathed. I have a laptop that works better now than it has in a year and will hopefully last me another two years or so (it was originally purchased in 2004 making it 3 years old, but it has had a new hard drive now, a mother board a year ago, a new power source 18 months ago, a new screen 9 months ago, etc. It's practically been rebuilt).

And best of all, I used the money I didn't spend on a laptop to buy a really fun new digital camera this weekend. Yay! I'm all ready for my seattle trip!