(no subject)
I've had a difficult few weeks full of unexpected repairs that have left me feeling stressed, frustrated, annoyed, and generally like I'm on the wrong end of a karmic assault. I had a long entry here about the latest fiasco with my laptop, which I've deleted in favor of something relatively succinct:
1) My laptop crashes, hard, I can't use it(boo)
2) A man comes to my house and spends two hours fixing my laptop (yay)
3) My laptop crashes, hard, I can't use it again the next evening (boo)
4) I freak out to a challenged Dell technician who agrees to send me a new laptop (yay) but said laptop will take several weeks to arrive (boo)
5) I freak out to one of my best friends who drops everything to immediately run out with me and buy a 1 TB external hard drive that she's been planning on purchasing for awhile. She pays for it and hands it to me, in hopes that I can make the dead laptop work long enough to rescue my entire graduate school career (course lectures, course work, syllabi, articles, master's thesis, dissertation, miles of data, hours of work), my old website files, and, most importantly, hundreds of pictures from my trips to Maine, Cape Cod, Ireland, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. (yay and boo all rolled into one)
6) I press hard on my laptop's lower left corner, hold my breath, and hold down the power button. Laptop turns on and I spend a tense 40 minutes getting the majority of my life onto the external hard drive. (yay)
Which brings me to today and how it is funny how life works. In the midst of kicking myself for being a moron and not backing up FIVE YEARS worth of giant life events from a laptop that has been a, for lack of a better term, piece of shit from nearly day one, I entered two small contests and won both. The first was a set of towels from Robyn's giveaway last week. Before I won, I owned exactly two dishtowels, hand me downs from my Mom. I NEED more than two dishtowels in my life. Then today I won a pro flickr account from Miss Zoot. I have thought of buying myself a pro account forever, and now I finally have one! I will never have to worry about losing all my pictures again.
I know this is not the same as winning a giant sack of cash, but little things like this make me giddy. It's as though life knew I needed a bit of a pick me up and random chance threw me a rope. The statistician in me can't help but smile at that.
1) My laptop crashes, hard, I can't use it(boo)
2) A man comes to my house and spends two hours fixing my laptop (yay)
3) My laptop crashes, hard, I can't use it again the next evening (boo)
4) I freak out to a challenged Dell technician who agrees to send me a new laptop (yay) but said laptop will take several weeks to arrive (boo)
5) I freak out to one of my best friends who drops everything to immediately run out with me and buy a 1 TB external hard drive that she's been planning on purchasing for awhile. She pays for it and hands it to me, in hopes that I can make the dead laptop work long enough to rescue my entire graduate school career (course lectures, course work, syllabi, articles, master's thesis, dissertation, miles of data, hours of work), my old website files, and, most importantly, hundreds of pictures from my trips to Maine, Cape Cod, Ireland, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. (yay and boo all rolled into one)
6) I press hard on my laptop's lower left corner, hold my breath, and hold down the power button. Laptop turns on and I spend a tense 40 minutes getting the majority of my life onto the external hard drive. (yay)
Which brings me to today and how it is funny how life works. In the midst of kicking myself for being a moron and not backing up FIVE YEARS worth of giant life events from a laptop that has been a, for lack of a better term, piece of shit from nearly day one, I entered two small contests and won both. The first was a set of towels from Robyn's giveaway last week. Before I won, I owned exactly two dishtowels, hand me downs from my Mom. I NEED more than two dishtowels in my life. Then today I won a pro flickr account from Miss Zoot. I have thought of buying myself a pro account forever, and now I finally have one! I will never have to worry about losing all my pictures again.
I know this is not the same as winning a giant sack of cash, but little things like this make me giddy. It's as though life knew I needed a bit of a pick me up and random chance threw me a rope. The statistician in me can't help but smile at that.