My laptop died last week…which may be partly my fault. 🙂 It was doing a zillion things—I always have a bunch of apps running, and 50+ browser tabs open in multiple windows. It had gotten really slow that day, and for some reason I thought: I know, I’ll reboot it!

I’d forgotten about the warning message I’d gotten earlier that day telling me I was almost out of disk space…

Since there was literally no disk space left (oops), my laptop was unable to boot. I normally kept it in a stand and plugged it into two big monitors, but something had obviously gone awry I pulled it out of the stand and set it flat on the kitchen counter. Except…it wasn’t flat. 🙂 The bottom of the laptop had become slightly rounded because the battery had swelled, which is a Very Bad Thing. And once I realized that (which I only did because my husband pointed it out), I remembered that I’d noticed that the bottom wasn’t flat a few months ago. I just hadn’t thought anything about it. You might be wondering: What exactly did I think at the time, and why did I assume it made any sense for the bottom of my laptop to suddenly become rounded? That is an excellent question which I am completely unable to answer. 🙂

Fortunately my husband lent me his laptop, and I keep almost everything in the cloud in some way or another, so I was able to get back up and running with most things after only an hour or two.

But there’s more! Yesterday I realized I couldn’t open any of my Photoshop files that were in a Dropbox folder on an external drive, which was alarming as every single book cover I’ve created is in a Photoshop file. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but it turns out that while the files on that drive are bad, what’s actually in Dropbox is fine. Whew! I think this may have been because I was accessing the drive across the network in a way I’d never done before…although it still doesn’t quite make sense. Whatever happened with those files also happened to my Quicken file, so today I realized that all the work I did balancing accounts and things last weekend didn’t actually get saved, and has to be redone.

My new computer should arrive tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to recreating my little world. I’m especially excited about finally being able to look through all my photos from Tokyo on a big screen. They’re all safe, but I didn’t want to set up too many things on my husband’s laptop since my new computer was on its way. It’s an iMac, which I’ve resisted buying for a long time because I like the flexibility of a laptop. But most of what I do is at my desk and doesn’t require a laptop, so I think this is the right decision.

One good thing that came out of all of this is that I sort of cleaned my desk. “Sort of” means that I got rid of some extra computer-related things (a monitor, an external hard drive, and an Airport that I didn’t even realize existed), and I dusted (at least the top of the desk). There’s still a big pile of papers that I need to sort through because I’m behind on paying bills thanks to all my computer excitement, but at least there’s a lot more space for the pile. 🙂

I started a new short story today, and am really happy with where it’s going. Writing is like exercise: if I take too long of a break it’s hard to get going again, even though it’s something I want to do—and know I’m capable of doing. I hadn’t written anything in over a month, and on top of that I’ve been super busy—even without the computer craziness. 🙂 So it was really, really hard to get going today. But now that I’ve started this story I should be fine…until the next time I take too long off from writing…