What I am thankful for...

Yesterday I was thankful for only three things.

A family that loves and supports me in all things.
Friends who love me and support me in all things.
A husband who loves me, supports me, and is fabulous for so many things.

Okay, that last line probably should have read "for so many reasons" but I was having a moment.

I didn't really have my health (infection in the lobe of my ear... which I'm not going to talk about, some of you may be eating), I had no money, I had no computer, I had no theory chapter, I had no red wine...

The list is endless.

But today life got so much better.

I am typing this from my new mac.

My shiny new Mac.

Shall I show you my new mac?

I haz nu Macs, let me showz yew.


Iz purdy, yes/yes?

Okay enough lolspeak. But I am REALLY HAPPY.

Also adding to the joy and the mayhem is a finger of scotch...

Which I needed before I checked to see....

Did it....

YES! I have my ENTIRE old harddrive. I can't find a single thing missing. Crap loads of iTunes, translations of German articles in progress (which I forgot I hadn't backed up) and MY DISSERTATION.

MY CURRENT DISSERTATION.

Up to the minute, not missing a darn thing. Even has the highlights I put in before turning off my computer on that fateful day (so that I would know what to focus on in the morning... the morning that never came).

There is no way to express the joy.

Especially after the finger of scotch I had in celebration. To keep the first one company you know. I'm now out of scotch and red wine. Sad until you realize that there are two bottles of port, 3 bottles of white wine, and one bottle of cognac in the other room. NO, I am NOT going to go drink them. All. Tonight. Nope. May fetch the cognac though....

I'm supposed to make stir fry tonight. How on earth will I manage the knife? Perhaps I will dance around drunkenly and give direction to my long suffering husband.

I am so happy. *Smile*

Triumph and tragedy

My computer arrived today!! I didn't actually see it, just the box, when I went to pay for it, because I then sent it off to Copenhagen to have my rescued data uploaded to it. But within a week I will be back, hard at work, on my OWN computer at my OWN desk.

Which means I should probably clean up my desk. It is a mountain of research at the moment. The floor, at the moment surprisingly clear, will soon take on the topography of a small mountain range. Ah, scholarship! Who knew that most of the pit-falls and stumbling blocks of dissertating were actually physical rather than mental?

Tragedy struck this week in the death of the washing machine. I'm down to tank tops, mismatched socks and sexy underwear. Sexy underwear? Yes, I have a supply of sexy underwear, the kind that you don't normally wear unless you're going out on a date and are certainly hoping you'll take off later in the evening. Lace is all very well and good, but it chafes so!

Further tragedy ensued due to the poor tips my husband earned this last weekend. I've had to get very creative with the food we have in the house. This resulted in one very horrible meal. I followed the recipe exactly to make curried red cabbage. However, the recipe I chose involved a large amount of vinegar, which NONE of the other recipes required (they wanted me to use olive oil) and I should have followed the recipe pack, as it were. Alas, I ended up with a curried red cabbage that smelled and tasted of bile. It even felt rather like bile (slimy, burns the throat). Thankfully I did do a taste test before serving it to my poor companion in life.

There was retching in the kitchen.

Not only did it smell, taste, and feel like bile, it also resulted in bile.

I was still twitching when I served the curry rice. There wasn't quite enough of it to make a full filling meal, but the Danish Boy was very understanding and appreciative of my efforts.

We were both heartened to discover then that he'd accidentally over-paid his taxi-boss and we got $40 back. That will cover us until my boy gets paid later this week.

So in the end there was more triumph, because this means I can put together a nice meal tomorrow night for our visiting friend and no one will have to suffer curried red cabbage ever again!

The five stages of grief

I am slowly coming to terms with the loss of my mac. It was a lot more traumatic than I'd anticipated and I think my husband was a little shocked at my complete breakdown on day three of the Mac crisis.

The crisis is now reaching epic proportions. I cannot seem to be able to buy another Mac - my credit card seems to have become as unreadable as my hard drive. I now need to order another credit card. And somehow get that mailed to me since Bank of America doesn't like to mail credit cards overseas.

Also, did you know that in times of extreme stress, you sweat a lot more than normal? And that you can smell, like, twenty times as bad as you would on a normal day, even if you had forgotten deodorant? Talk about a week I would not like to relive. My clothes and the Danish Boy would very much like to avoid another week like that one as well.

I'm still a little shellshocked, but according to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, I may be coming to acceptance and recovery.

Oh I went through all the other stages. Denied that my computer was dead, denied that it would bother me, denied that I was really upset about it. Denial was hand in hand with panic that first night. "This is NOT happening!" was a constant refrain. Then after being told that it was unlikely that they would be able to get my data and even if they did, there was no guarantee that the computer would last much longer, I just said, "Oh, well, then I guess I should get another computer then." I went home, figured out how I could buy another computer with my credit card and picked out my new computer as if I didn't have a care in the world. Then there was the anger. I was mad that I hadn't backed up my data (still in denial about how it wasn't really the data that bothered me) and that I had only turned off the computer on that fateful day in order to save two kroner on energy costs (still pretty mad about that actually). I moved right into bargaining after that. "If the Mac guys can just get the data off the computer, I'll be happy," I said. This wasn't in the least bit true, it turns out. I haven't had word on my data yet, but I doubt I'll be really happy, even if they do. By day three of the crisis, I had entered depression, which ended in hysterical sobbing, much to my husband's shock.

It's now day 5. I still wonder if there was any way that I could have fixed it. That I could somehow get my Mac back. On one level I know it was on it's last legs. The fan ran constantly, the heat coming from the computer made it too hot to touch sometimes and it was getting harder and harder to reboot the computer after installing the standard updates. It had a long life for a laptop. Especially one that had been dropped that many times (the power cord didn't quite fit right after I dropped it last year), gone to so many foreign countries, had coffee, beer, and indian food spilled on it, been broken in half in the airport (never did get any money back for that), and hadn't been properly cleaned in years... okay, ever.

But like a faithful pet that has to be put down after a sudden trauma, I wasn't ready to lose my Mac. It was one of the few things I walked away with in the divorce. It was my link to the outside world while I am stuck in a small office, trying to have brilliant thoughts. It was my means of contacting friends and family while I'm thousands of miles away. It wasn't just a computer, it was a piece of my soul.

Someday (hopefully soon, this PC is killing me) I will have a new Mac. It won't replace the Powerbook G4, and I don't expect it to. I miss you, my Mac. Thanks for everything.

Disaster

Last night my Mac, my beautiful, wonderful, trusty Mac, which has had horrible things done to it, survived and continued to march along side me, died.

Some sort of catastrophic failure of the hard drive. The guy at the Mac store could see the hard drive when he tried running my Mac through another Mac, but couldn't access the data. Or the drive, for that matter.

I've sent it off to try to recover the data, because that's about all that can be done with it. It would require too much work to repair and replace all the bits that might need to be replaced, since it's not particularly clear what all happened for this failure to occur.

I'd really like the data... my last two weeks of work on my dissertation wasn't backed up. Stupid, I know. Back in the days when I used floppies, I always kept my papers on disks, not the hard drive, but lap tops lack disk drives these days, you have to keep things on data sticks and I haven't become used to saving data to these devices. At least the rest of my dissertation is backed up, not only on my husband's PC (which I'm currently using, sigh), but on a data stick and a hard copy (print out).

So it's time for a new mac. I probably won't be able to get a MacBookPro, like I'd love, but I don't really need all that extra power and bells and whistles and... oh, I wish I could have one!!