The Good and The Bad

NOT one of my more attractive looks

Well, the good news is that my left eye, the one that’s been the star of three (or was it four – I forget) of this past year’s eye surgeries, no longer makes me look like a vampire on a weepy bender. Yeah, it was all blood drenched, which, just FYI, was a worrisome thing given all the knives and lasers that’ve been in and out of it lately.

Turns out it was nothing but a burst blood vessel. Ya know how those happen? Sneezing and/or coughing mega hard are two possible avenues to HOLY-SHIT-what-happened-to-you City. I had (have) a cold and, boyhowdy, if there was an Olympic event for sneezing and coughing I TOTALLY would take the gold!

This morning the white of my eye is back to being all white-like. Yea!

Bad news? Here in Valhalla, late yesterday afternoon, we had a wee power outage. When lights, heat and POWAH! returned, my laptop would not, no matter what I tried, recognize my external hard drive. This is the drive where all my work files live – you know, graphic design shit…how I make the cat food and Jamo money. This IS a big fucking deal.

Coco does not care about your crapped out
 computer issues as long as they don’t
 adversely effect her nap. Ya know?

I made a ton of efforts to reintroduce the two – to remind them of their past loving experiences. Nope. I then spent a couple hours IMing with text support – no joy. There are other things to try (will Paula’s computer recognize the ex drive?) but shit looks a little bleak-ish here in Apple Town. What I think this is gonna come down to is me getting a new laptop. Sparky here’s been a hell of a trooper but he’s getting old. Annoying, fiddly-but-important bits keep breaking down/crapping out.

HEY, just like me!

The good-ish news is that all my pre-January work files are on the back up drive. You have a back up drive AND an external hard drive? Isn’t that overkill? You know my motto “Why just kill when you can overkill.” I’m happy as hell that I indulged my paranoia.

A better looking black eye than mine.

I’ll head down to the Apple store this weekend and look into new, more oomph-y laptopness. The folks there (and online support too) are awesome+ – they should be for the price I’m paying. The tech dude finally threw in the towel yesterday, saying it’s not the Mac. He told me to contact the external hard drive support line. Yeah. Right. The makers do have a support section on their website BUT there’s no live chat – just canned instructions and a place to email questions. Yes, I’ll ask, I’ll try their canned instructions (the ones I haven’t already tried 12,000 times) but this is weak sauce compared to Apple’s 24/7 live chat tech support.

Meanwhile, Paula’s contacting our on-call Mister Wizard. MAYbe he can, not only rematerialize my external drive but also, help my laptop survive for another year. An old broad can hope!