chanter1944 | scares and birthdays

Yeah, weird heck of a combo hm?

The scare was this. This morning, probably literally seconds after my early class let out, the entire campus lost power. Not just one section, not just the usual this half's fine, this half's got no lights, the *whole* blinking campus's gone dark. Ick. But I've got an appointment in Madison, so I catch my ride and leave everything else from the store run in the dorm room thinking okie, I'll get back in a couple hours and the lights will be back on and my computer will work and yay.

So I go to Madison, I get my appointment done, I end up at Red Lobster with dad and we both eat way too much shrimp which is awesome seeing as what I live on while I'm here is... ih. And we drive back into Whitewater, walk into the dorm and yay! the power's back on. But...

I turn my computer on thinking ok, this'd better work. And it doesn't. So I ring a friend of mine at CSD and I'm like "Uh, Greg? Does this error message mean something icky?" And he's like... "Uh, Charlie? that sounds like your hard drive is fried."

My thoughts right then? Oh *bleepity bleep bleep* Oh s**t! Because I have all my logs for a year and a half's time as Lina, including the most recent ones that I haven't uploaded to angelfire yet on there, as well as the impromptu records of clutches hatched on SouCon, all my schoolwork *and* poetry and fanfiction I'm going to submit to the campus literary magazine, and the poem with Valeris in it that I promised to show Giles... aieee! So I just about cried.

Then I got all the numbers on the bottom of the computer dictated to me, and dad left, and I called Dell support. And wound up enlisting Katie and Sam down the hall to help me read my screen since my screenreader had gone splat pfft with the hard drive itself... and that's sort of a given. So Katie takes my cell phone and she and yonder tech support person (who was really knowledgable which is nice) run a bunch of diagnostic thingies and all the while Sam and I are trying to entertain my sniffy lab who's got a thing about people in wheelchairs so was having a field day with both girls in the room. And all of a sudden, I hear...

"It says windows xp home edition." And then I turn my speakers on, the rewritten boot sequence from last spring kicks in, and joy of joys! I hear that lovely little windows chime that means hi! Your computer works again!

Weeeee!

Needless to say I was relieved, Katie got a hug, and I owe both girls a favor of their choice somewhere in the near future. Apparently it was the power failure and a system restore point working in tandem to make me *think* (and everyone else think too) that my hard drive had gone pfft fart. Talk about amok time hm?

But yay! Files=saved and fine, and I am *so* uploading shtuff to angelfire tonight! And saving the rest to disc or a CD or both or... something.

Whew!

As for birthdays...

Happy birthday

firebyrd and

fealu_bryne!

Wee!

Off to make good my promise to myself, finish that Valeris poem thingie to show Giles, then upload stuff to angelfire. Wait, that's two promises. But still!