Crash

Saturday we passed a group of people on the street who were listening to a woman discuss the best places to buy pistachios in the neighborhood. I nudged JW. "I think that's Ana Sortun!" "Who?" "The chef at Oleana." He rolled his eyes. "How am I supposed to know that? You're the only one who knows who these people are." But I was excited. "I think she's giving a culinary tour of OUR neighborhood!" (Which contains lots of little Armenian grocery stores and a few Persian restaurants, and is in fact a fantastic place for food shopping.)

That night I tried to visit Oleana's website to confirm my sighting. "What kind of website is this?" I complained to JW. "It froze my entire computer! And... do you hear that noise?" JW, across the room, did hear the noise. It was a loud grinding and sputtering sound coming from my computer. "Maybe you got a virus," he sneered. (Sneered because he has a Mac.) As the grinding grew louder, this sounded more likely. I powered down my laptop and left it alone.

Today, my computer wouldn't boot up. As a former software engineer, believe me that "wouldn't boot up" here means "catastrophic failure," not "shut it down and try again." After hours spent on the secret Disaster Recovery screens that you have to hit the right keys at exactly the right times to even see, I managed to back up some of my files and had to REFORMAT MY ENTIRE HARD DRIVE. So I get to set up my computer all over again. And JW gets to laugh at me even more for subjecting myself to the joys of Windows.

At least I got to go through the hours of aggravation myself, instead of paying somebody else to do it. And the laptop is still alive, assuming it continues to start up regularly. If it doesn't, I'll add it to the list with both of our cars of "objects we rely upon that sometimes stop working for no apparent reason," and maybe commandeer JW's old iBook.

P.S. - Notice NO LINKS in this post.