in brief

One of our two big fan tail goldfish (Mau Mau) died the other day. When I say big, I'm talking the sort of goldfish you'd need two hands to hold. I feel bad for Big Eddie, who is currently swimming alone in the tank. Mau Mau had some issues with his swim bladder last month, and we thought he had recovered, but the other day it was just a sudden relapse and nothing we did helped this time.

We still wait on the house issue. It turns out mortgage #1 has not okayed the deal yet; realtors are still certain this is going to go through. Meanwhile, interest rates went up >_<. And, we wait.

I fear Asfaloth may be dead. Laptop will turn all the lights on, but nobody's home. No sound of anything going on, nothing on the monitor. Some of you probably recall that there were issues in Seattle, and I think those were supposed to be the warning flags. Luckily, most of everything is on flash drives. If it turns out the hard drive is fried or something, I will likely lose about $10 in downloaded music, the last and currently unfinished chapters of Insatiable and Unforgettable (neither of which was particularly pleasing me, truth be told), a handful of started and unfinished fics, and some of the RPing that Jules and I have done.

The RPing stuff and a fic I started about Glorfindel telling a story about his father are the only two things that I will be upset about, I think.

Well, having to reinstall Adobe will be a pain in the ass, as will having to reinstall all of the virus software and such, but it's not like it's the first time. Hal dumped twice before we replaced him, and Little Balrog's hard drive went suicidal months before it's warrenty was up. Asfaloth has been trouble since day one, when, upon coming home, he decided to entirely wipe everything that the store had done to set him up and refused to allow anything to work. He was back the next day and we spent literally hours standing at the counter with the confused tech telling us 'well, at 3am someone decided to do such and such' and us going 'we're the only ones who live in the house and we were asleep at 3am'. Hence, the massive use of flash drives with this one.

Of course, had I ever plugged in the external hard drive I picked up a year ago to back up the laptop....

Thankfully, I was using a very G rated picture for my wallpaper, in case the techs do get the laptop up and running.

Classes are going well, yay for me not saving all my work to the laptop and putting it onto a flashdrive instead, or else I'd have been screwed. I have the Excel and Access classes done, the Vista class is nearly finished, the Word class about halfway, and the Power Point class is my ice cream sundae for when I get the rest completely done. I love Power Point.

not out to pasture yet

My little electronic horsie got fixed tonight. I had a class this evening, but it let out at 6:15 instead of 8:00 (yay!) which meant cheaper parking (yay!) so we drove home and grabbed the laptop and took it up to Best Buy. The guy who was free when I came in appeared of the three guys to be the most knowledgable (what with the discussions of the other guys that I could hear in the background).

Anyhow, after explaining things from Seattle to present day, the tech flipped the laptop over, fiddled around with some stuff and flipped it back over again. And... it turned on.

Took another half hour to straighten it out from all the reboots, from Seattle until now, as I think it got a good fifty safe mode starts in during that time.

Turns out, at some point, probably during transport, the battery got disconnected by just a tad. That was enough to make it cranky in Seattle. When we got home and it was back on a flat surface and not on my lap, it was fine. When I had it at work and it freaked out on me, I had it on my lap, and the battery wasn't connecting right or something. I guess that's why the power cord and the battery were so hot -- was taking a lot more to actually charge them up.

Anyhow, he also gave me some advice on how to speed up the system a little, and answered a monitor disposal question I had. So Asfaloth is now resting comfortably on his box in the living room. Tomorrow will be the day of hooking him up to the external HD to back him up and then all will be completely well. (yay)

And I have a half day tomorrow, and off Monday if possible. Oh, and I went to a grant writing meeting today, which means I qualify to write institutional grants now. Mostly common sense stuff, but there were a couple things learned, and it was interesting seeing one of the, how to put it, uber professional parts of the college. The department where people wear pointy toed high heeled snake skin shoes as opposed to sneakers to work. Beautiful conference room. Very glad I remembered the meeting and didn't just wear a tshirt to work today (being in non-session, we typically down grade to t-shirts and flip flops until we go back into session again, which will be Monday).

Kitty is at my feet giving me the 'time for bed' look, so, is time for bed!