Well, it's been a while, and things have not been going well. Not that I'm complaining. I'm just cataloging some bad things which have happened.
Remember the $1700 car bill? It turned into a $2300 car bill, what with the discovery of something having to do with some strut or other. They explained it to me, I told them to fix it, and I just filed everything in the 'deny while you can' pile.
Remember the new computer I bought for just over $700, that was supposed to keep me from having to buy a new laptop for a few years? Well, it's great, I love it, I'm not complaining. But now my laptop, apparently feeling old and neglected, has decided to go belly-up. Well, maybe not belly-up, but it wouldn't boot, and it took my tech guy JC most of the day yesterday to figure out what was wrong. I quote: "It had corrupted sectors on the hard drive. This could be a sign of future failure.... It could go tomorrow or in two years. Don't know for sure." Well, I could get hit by a bus in the meantime, and at the moment the thing is working, but when it finally comes time to pull the plug, I don't know what I'm going to do. A new laptop would cost a lot more than the new computer.
Remember all that marking I had to do? Well, I did get it done, I don't know how many weeks late, by which I mean 'in reasonable time'--I actually did get grades in before the absolute last deadline, but since that was Friday last week (I did it on New Year's Eve), that's not saying much. Mostly because by the time I was ready to sit down and do them, I'd done something to my back and was laid up for almost a week. Not a full-blown spasm, but something weird. Felt saccral, so probably lumbar extensor/erector, and it wasn't so much the lingering pain, or the lingering immobility, but just the overwhelming thereness of the soreness that was distracting. That and on the day I was going to take everything home I literally could not lift the stack of papers.
But now I'm a) Acting Head, b) I've survived my first official Heads' Meeting, c) I have a course break, d) I'm within about 24 hours of having a review in only a month late, e) the papers I lost during an e-mail meltdown (did I mention my e-mail meltdown) are trickling in, so my students are becoming increasingly less likely to hunt me down and kill me. Which is a good thing, because as acting head my colleagues are likely to start any minute now.
So we'll see how this week goes. More Thursday.
2 comments:
Rob - I'm not sure how the backup restore software works on your laptop, but I was able to throw a new hard drive in mine very painlessly. I booted up the restore program from the cd with the original hard drive in it (the only way to get mine to start the whole process), hot-swapped it with the new one and continued on. Now it has a nice big 160 gig drive in there.
You might want to do some research on yours, because the guy at Best Buy informed me that mine would only work with the same brand of hard drive, but I think you should be able to do it fairly easily.
Hope that helps?
But...but...can't I just buy a new laptop?
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