Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Bye Bye iBook
Ah, geeeee. What a week I have had. Really, I hate to vent, to apply negative energy to that which is already challenging my happiness, but I must get it off my chest and then I promise to let it go.
I guess it started with all the craziness around trying to get my video footage off the Sony Handycam and into a viewable format. All that hard work trapped in a handycam and no way to solve the problem myself was enough to keep me up all night long and slightly loopy. Then, I came home to MJ for my days off and this is what happened:
Monday night I attempt to download an operating system update which seemingly goes smoothly. Until I go to restart the computer at which point my iBook will not boot up past the grey screen. I knew instantly that this was beyond bad. Macs don't crash, but when they do, they crash totally and completely. This was at around midnight. Sick to my stomache, I get onto my mom's PC and start researching what this could mean. Quickly, as I read, It becomes clear that something has gone wrong with the update that I thought went smoothly. All night long, I try to reboot and teach myself how to do Safe Boot and decipher different error messages, etc. All I can think is this: I HAVE BACKED UP NOTHING. If my hard drive is dead and the data gone, I will have lost everything. EVERYTHING. My poetry, my design work, my raw graphics files for my website, all my addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, my music, my photographs, my resumes, all the very expensive software that Jordan gave me, everything. You would think after watching Jordan lose so much after his PowerBook was stolen that I would know to back stuff up. And I have been thinking about it for the last six months. But unsure if I should spend my money on an extrenal or just buy an iPod or both, I have chosen neither. So, there I was, Monday night, pacing and panicking. Waiting for 9am to roll around so I could call a Mac Doctor in Regina. At 7am I am delirious from not sleeping and obviously anxious so I start to apply lots and lots of makeup to my face. Like maybe if I found the right shade of eyeshadow everything would be alright. I don't even wear makeup.
By 11am I am in Regina - looking a little bit like a hooker with all that makeup - and three different people are hovered around my iBook. Seems it is necessary to do a reload of the operating system, but of course my disc is in Vancouver, not Saskatchewan. And I don't know the phone number or email address of my subletters to call them to get them to courier it to me. In fact, I don't know the #s or email address of ANY of my 404 gang. Then, we find a disc for an indentical iBook in the back room and suddenly our problem seems solvable. Until they find out that that disc will not in fact work either.
My mother pipes up and asks --- would it help if we bought a new MacBook and just concentrated on saving the data??
Yes, they respond. It would.
Merry Christmas, says mom to a hasn't-slept-for-30-odd-hours me.
So, we go and buy me a brand new MacBook - 80GB hard drive, 1 MB of RAM, Tiger, DVD Burner, the new Core 2 Duo processor, built in iSight...the works. While we do this, Sarah at RCE rips my iBook apart and digs into my hard drive to see what can be saved. I am so tired and so upset that all I can do is pray to That Which Is and affirm that happy endings are MINE NOW.
The happy ending came. Everything was savable on my hard drive. So we put a clam shell around it and when my MacBook is ready I will transfer everything over, wipe it clean and have myself the external HD I was looking for. I am so thankful and grateful and relieved. You can not know. And I have a new Love that will be in my arms by next Tuesday. But holy drama.
It doesn't end there. Last night I went to bed at 9pm and slept this morning until 10am when the phone rang. It was the doctor's office. Seems I have some test results that need discussing. (For those who don't know my history, I had some pretty serious stages of Cervical Cancer when I was 17, which I beat with surgery. In 2002, I started getting abnormal results again, but have had completely normal test results the last year and a half - until now, it seems.) I am going in at 1:30pm tomorrow to talk to Dr. Thorpe and I am scared. I don't want to deal with this cancer stuff anymore. I want a healthy cervix. I want a healthy everything. I wonder what I am supposed to be learning from this cancer drama following me around?
I know I am strong, but when all this challenging crap comes down on me, I long to have a partner to lean on. Thank God for Mom and Lee and a few of my other friends, but oh! for a partner to come with me tomorrow and sit in the waiting room and tell me everything is going to be alright, no matter what the doctor says. Oh for a partner to drive me and my sick iBook to the Mac Hospital and hold my hand while I say goodbye to truest companion I have known since March of 2006.
Although, It does feel good to be able to say to the world that I am able to face the toughest stuff on my own. How many women out there can say that? I am woman, hear me roar.
Meow.
I guess it started with all the craziness around trying to get my video footage off the Sony Handycam and into a viewable format. All that hard work trapped in a handycam and no way to solve the problem myself was enough to keep me up all night long and slightly loopy. Then, I came home to MJ for my days off and this is what happened:
Monday night I attempt to download an operating system update which seemingly goes smoothly. Until I go to restart the computer at which point my iBook will not boot up past the grey screen. I knew instantly that this was beyond bad. Macs don't crash, but when they do, they crash totally and completely. This was at around midnight. Sick to my stomache, I get onto my mom's PC and start researching what this could mean. Quickly, as I read, It becomes clear that something has gone wrong with the update that I thought went smoothly. All night long, I try to reboot and teach myself how to do Safe Boot and decipher different error messages, etc. All I can think is this: I HAVE BACKED UP NOTHING. If my hard drive is dead and the data gone, I will have lost everything. EVERYTHING. My poetry, my design work, my raw graphics files for my website, all my addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, my music, my photographs, my resumes, all the very expensive software that Jordan gave me, everything. You would think after watching Jordan lose so much after his PowerBook was stolen that I would know to back stuff up. And I have been thinking about it for the last six months. But unsure if I should spend my money on an extrenal or just buy an iPod or both, I have chosen neither. So, there I was, Monday night, pacing and panicking. Waiting for 9am to roll around so I could call a Mac Doctor in Regina. At 7am I am delirious from not sleeping and obviously anxious so I start to apply lots and lots of makeup to my face. Like maybe if I found the right shade of eyeshadow everything would be alright. I don't even wear makeup.
By 11am I am in Regina - looking a little bit like a hooker with all that makeup - and three different people are hovered around my iBook. Seems it is necessary to do a reload of the operating system, but of course my disc is in Vancouver, not Saskatchewan. And I don't know the phone number or email address of my subletters to call them to get them to courier it to me. In fact, I don't know the #s or email address of ANY of my 404 gang. Then, we find a disc for an indentical iBook in the back room and suddenly our problem seems solvable. Until they find out that that disc will not in fact work either.
My mother pipes up and asks --- would it help if we bought a new MacBook and just concentrated on saving the data??
Yes, they respond. It would.
Merry Christmas, says mom to a hasn't-slept-for-30-odd-hours me.
So, we go and buy me a brand new MacBook - 80GB hard drive, 1 MB of RAM, Tiger, DVD Burner, the new Core 2 Duo processor, built in iSight...the works. While we do this, Sarah at RCE rips my iBook apart and digs into my hard drive to see what can be saved. I am so tired and so upset that all I can do is pray to That Which Is and affirm that happy endings are MINE NOW.
The happy ending came. Everything was savable on my hard drive. So we put a clam shell around it and when my MacBook is ready I will transfer everything over, wipe it clean and have myself the external HD I was looking for. I am so thankful and grateful and relieved. You can not know. And I have a new Love that will be in my arms by next Tuesday. But holy drama.
It doesn't end there. Last night I went to bed at 9pm and slept this morning until 10am when the phone rang. It was the doctor's office. Seems I have some test results that need discussing. (For those who don't know my history, I had some pretty serious stages of Cervical Cancer when I was 17, which I beat with surgery. In 2002, I started getting abnormal results again, but have had completely normal test results the last year and a half - until now, it seems.) I am going in at 1:30pm tomorrow to talk to Dr. Thorpe and I am scared. I don't want to deal with this cancer stuff anymore. I want a healthy cervix. I want a healthy everything. I wonder what I am supposed to be learning from this cancer drama following me around?
I know I am strong, but when all this challenging crap comes down on me, I long to have a partner to lean on. Thank God for Mom and Lee and a few of my other friends, but oh! for a partner to come with me tomorrow and sit in the waiting room and tell me everything is going to be alright, no matter what the doctor says. Oh for a partner to drive me and my sick iBook to the Mac Hospital and hold my hand while I say goodbye to truest companion I have known since March of 2006.
Although, It does feel good to be able to say to the world that I am able to face the toughest stuff on my own. How many women out there can say that? I am woman, hear me roar.
Meow.
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