disaster

So, Friday night I got home, got on the computer and in a little while Raleigh came charging in sideways and knocked the top inch or so of my drink all over my desk. I didn't notice till the next day some was in the keyboard, albeit on the side I don't use (the number keys). The keyboard didn't seem affected, and I got my desk dried off, eventually.

Saturday late morning I got on the computer again, just doing my normal thing, when Firefox started acting hinky. One thing I love about FF is when it shuts down because of a lockup or other problem, it offers me the chance to reopen the same windows and tabs. I didn't think much about it, just forced a quit and expected everything to go on as usual.

FF wouldn't relaunch. I couldn't get into the FF directory. When I tried to launch Epiphany (just a random decision; I could have tried Opera or Mozilla or Konqueror instead) the computer locked up.

After several attempts at rebooting (I never got past the blue screen with the white X onnit), getting scary messages like "IO failure" and I'll have to "rebuild tree," opening up the box and vacuuming out a gob of cat hair (and noticing a small splash of that Friday night drink inside), I decided to attempt a reinstall.

For a while I didn't think that would work, either. Eventually it did. Thank the gods I was able to get into another shell and back up my entire "home" directory (and hundreds of pictures) into the storage hard drive. Loss of all those pictures would have made me cry.

I haven't done a reinstall in three years! I'm running Mandrake 10.0, so the update packages are taking forever to download. Remember, I'm on dialup.

Could have been worse, I suppose. This morning I've downloaded Firefox and next I suppose I'll untar it, then start fresh without bookmarks (sob), since those were irretrievable.

Not how I had envisioned spending my weekend, at all.