Complaining

So I hate Windows Vista. Friday night as I was update-stalking BPAL and chatting and listening to Pandora and playing Spider Solitaire and so on, everything in laptopland was fine and dandy. I closed my laptop around 1 and went to bed.

Saturday afternoon when I got back from a run, I opened my laptop. The icons were all the same, and all where they should be. My first sign of impending terror was that my wallpaper was GONE. It is emphatically not a happy thing to be expecting to see a wonderfully sardonic xkcd strip and find yourself confronted with "supergeneric default wallpaper one." Also, everything I had opened up - iTunes, spider, the novel outline, a chunk of a novel chapter, my email - was all closed. So I clicked on iTunes. It said "now configuring iTunes." I sat there and waited in dawning horror as it finally configured and there was NOTHING. I have 1400 songs - not as many as some but quite a few nonetheless. ALL GONE. Shaking, I opened my documents. EMPTY. Photos? POOF. This is when the screaming panic set in.

Eventually, Brownie decided we should call my dad, who, being a supergeek, is wise in the ways of Windows. He made me reboot, which I had been terrified to do in case it made the loss of everything permanent. It came up saying my user profile wasn't loading correctly (um, no shit). So Dad told me to find a real geek since he didn't want to attempt to walk me through everything on the phone, and that everything would be fine and calm down.

So I've sort of calmed down in that I know everything is apparently accessible and that I will in fact be okay. At the same time, of everything on my computer, all that's backed up is one dissertation chapter and half of the dissertation introduction. There's another half chapter and a shitton of notes that aren't backed up at all. My music isn't backed up. My photos aren't backed up. My novel work isn't backed up. None of my old papers or anything else is backed up. I have recipes and knitting patterns and crochet patterns and all sorts of shit that could just disappear forever. Lesson learned: BACK SHIT UP. I'll be buying an external hard drive when I get paid next Thursday. And using it.

I cannot believe how dependent I am on my laptop. It feels like half my life is inaccesible to me. I mean, I can still log on to the various websites and online things that I need by using Brownie's computer, however irritating it is that I can't just click on a bunch of links in my favorites and be pre-logged in and whatever. It's extremely strange to me that there's a forum that I frequent which I don't know the address to, so that I could only get to it by clicking on a link to it in the siggie of another person on a different forum. I couldn't remember my password for this blog - I had to go through and create a new one. All of this is just irritating, but it's basically fine. The real heart attack is the writing on my laptop that is currently dead to the world.

The weirdest thing - probably the most telling, and the part I should be paying the most attention to - is that the fact that the dissertation may have up and disappeared was the thing that I was least concerned about. It wasn't my first thought - it wasn't actually my third. The thoughts went in order of novel, music, pictures, and then dissertation about two minutes later. Most of that time was devoted to freaking the fuck out about the novel. It's the novel start I'm planning on using for NaNoWriMo - I have a few chapters more or less okay for the moment (about 15,000 words total), and was planning on using NaNoWriMo to flesh out and write the vast majority of the rest of it (i.e., the writing I have done so far won't be counted toward the 50,000 word goal). The idea of losing those chapters is stomach churning. So (to wrap it back around)(yes, I do have ADD) I feel like I should have cared more about the dissertation than the novel as it's the dissertation which would land me a Ph.D., whereas the novel isn't realistically likely to do anything for me. And yet I didn't much care about the dissertation. I know I'm that burnt out, but I guess the degree itself doesn't really mean much to me anymore. This, however, is a different post, which I will write when I'm ready.

So other than that, I've had 4 panic attacks since the initial horror of possible compocalypse (to borrow a term from Cleolinda)(and holy shit, her actual compocalypse blows mine to bits), drank a goodly bit more than strictly necessary Saturday night, and probably need to go on a run, which I'll do when I get done here. My current institution of higher ed, wherein lie the particular geeks who can fix dear laptop for free, is on fall break, meaning no one is around to fix my laptop until then. So Imma knit a scarf instead, and try and think through the rest of the novel outline that I cannot type since I cannot access that document. I hate this.