Journal: 06/04/06

Another week moseys to a close, but not before scaring me half to death. Rose dropped off her taxes for me to do and left me with $10.00 and the promise of more on Tuesday when she gets paid. I planned to complete her work today because it was slow behind the front desk, but I was sidetracked most of the day. It looks like I’ll have enough beer and cigarettes to get through tomorrow and that’s a good thing, I hate it when I’m short on my day off and tomorrow promises to be a busy day.

Another Week Over

Much of today was about putting the papers together for the trip to Salinas and Social Security tomorrow. There are other tasks on the list for Monday as well, so I went through my list of preparations in anticipation of getting everything done tomorrow with time to take a nap in the afternoon.

My laptop suffered a mental illness today and that reminded me how fragile my position in life is right now. My laptop is the most important piece of equipment I have at the moment. I use it to keep in touch with my accounts, use it to write and post blog entries and spend my slow hours behind the front desk keeping up on the news. In short, my laptop and I are welded together at the hip. Almost every piece of information that is important to me or my existence is on the laptop’s hard drive. Losing the laptop would be catastrophic to whatever small part of my current lifestyle I have left.

The laptop also represents potential; it is my main tool for getting work outside of my time on the front desk. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to take small, odd projects like Rose’s taxes that provide extra income. Whatever work I find in the future will most likely be done on the laptop in my spare time. No small wonder that when I installed a new piece of software on it today, and it stopped performing some critical functions, I became a bit panicked after all of my best technological skill failed to revive it completely.

Luckily, I back up the laptop on a regular basis, usually weekly for a complete backup and several times during the week for a file backup. This time though, my disk image backup was fourteen days old, although I was able to get recently modified data files off the system and onto the file backup. It took me until 3:00 AM this morning to fully restore the laptop, but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I hadn’t. Aside from the stress, the four hours of sleep I will get before I have to get up tomorrow is going to make for a wearing Monday.

I’ll post this later, as writing this post was a test of the laptop’s resurrection.