This is actually Thursday’s entry, but I haven’t been able to write it for a while, because, well, my computer gakked quite fantastically.
I shall start at the beginning. I had just uploaded the Portuguese version of the Crow book (w00t!) and was trying to edit the title page of the Pig book for the Swedish edition (w00t again!) when I found that Illustrator wouldn’t open. Funny that. So I see where it crashes, and it’s when it’s trying to optimize the font list. Aha, say I. Corrupt fonts. Easy to fix. I crack open my font manager, go on a hunt, and discover a lot of my system fonts have duplicated themselves multiple times.
If I were smart, I would’ve known this was going to turn out badly.
I ran fsck on the disk and was happy to discover an error message I’ve never seen before. It’s so exotic I can’t even write it here, because I have no recollection what it was. But the advice from the Google was quite clear: backup backup backup and re-install!
I know backing up is good practice, and I do do it quite a lot, but I have a 70GB drive in my laptop and don’t have a clean 70GB anywhere else in my home, so doing a full backup wasn’t something I was going to be able to do. I was deathly afraid if I tried to run the bit-by-bit backups like I usually do, I’d lose all my stuff somewhere in the middle. I had to do it right, and do it right away.
So I ran out to London Drugs and went on a hunt for a 70GB+ HD that I could use. $200 for 100GB, sometimes $300. LaCie has great drives, some of which look like Lego, but geez, I don’t want to spend $3/GB for a drive I can stack, cause at that price I’m not going to but enough to stack anyway.
Then I see it: Iogear drive for $115. 160GB. I bring it to the counter with my new copy of OS 10.4 (long somewhat incriminating story) and the guy at the counter says at least four times “Wow, that’s a really great price!”. I could probably get a cheaper one online, I guess, but I really wasn’t expecting to get that much space for that little money in a time of crisis. So I was happy.
I spent all last night trying to pick apart the files that I could recover vs the ones I couldn’t. My OS is mostly wasted, but my fonts (the good ones) survived. My documents are safe too. Mail is always backed up, thank god. But now I have to wait for the disk utils to do their work, so I’m offline all day today while I rebuild my life.
A friend of mine said our computers are like our hearts or our kidneys or our heads. When they have problems, it’s just as bad as when you have a migraine or a heartache or a kidney problem. I tend to agree, but in at least two of those cases, you can take strong painkillers to numb the pain. If I took Percocet now I’d just look like a drug addict. More like a drug addict.
So yes. My day is screwed up. But since my wife is away most of the day and her computer is in good condition, I can write in my blog a lot! Yay for me!
Or. Well. Something.
Upon reviewing my slate of things to do, I realized there wasn’t enough time in any particular day to put the proper attention to completing projects like Fixing Lavender or The Al Dente Code. I still intend to finish them, but they take that certain je ne sais quoi that I don’t have going right now. In terms of TADC, that’s teh funny. Ain’t none around.
So I closed down both blogs earlier today, hoping that the removal of two otherwise-dead blogs would save the world half-completed thought processes, and make us all a bit happier.
Little did I know that the TADC blog would be very quickly taken over by blog spammers, and even better, ones that immediately redirect you to pr0n! Woot! I’m sure it’ll be resolved quickly, but if you happened to be subscribed to that RSS feed and now think I’m doing something shady, don’t worry. I’m much more subtle about my shadiness.
And now I shall return to my giant pile of things undone, and hopefully update THIS blog with something worthwhile soon.
After many months (months? weeks, at least) of waiting, the Pig book is searchable via Google books. It’s kinda silly given that you can view it for free right here, in a dozen languages, but it’s still nifty.
Also, it appears that Amazon may or may not have found the two missing copies I sent them back in August, in which case you may or may not be able to order them from there. I only discovered the change in probable status because Google linked me there 
Stumbling back appears to be an apt description… I am not even close to fully-functional yet. I shall update again soonish.
To say that it’s been a tense month would be an almost-criminal understatement. There are, it appears, many levels of tension one can experience when confronted with a health problem like this. The obvious first stage has to do with “will they live?”, and all the related fears and regrets that never occur to you until you’re faced with the final exam and you haven’t done any studying.
After a while, the fear of death starts to ease, and you become aware that “survival” and “meaningful recovery” are two different things, and that, despite the fact that you’re not sleeping most night and your life is almost completely disassembling before your eyes, you just know this is going to go on for months.
And at that moment, that’s when you crash, because your body’s had enough and needs you to take a break. When you surface again, nothing’s changed, and it reinforces the feeling of slow doom you’d suspected before. And that’s when you start to really go back to living.
It feels like it’s been half a year, but it hasn’t even been a month. I can’t even remember what I was doing before.
Thanks to all those who wrote kind words at the start of this, and to give a general update: she is not awake, but opens her eyes and moves her body, reacting to stimuli, and is out of danger. There’s no way of telling what happens next, I guess, so we have to wait. Anxious is the word.
It’s funny, because at times like these, telemarketers seem t call more often. We don’t use the phone much here, so when it rings we expect it to be from the hospital in Japan. It’s really REALLY annoying to get a call selling you crap you don’t need when you’ve been steeling yourself for bad news.
I don’t know when I’ll be back up and running for real. I won’t be doing “Push” for a while, and all my previously-scheduled activities are still on hold. I have to make up for lost work-time on other projects first. I want to finish a short story I’ve been contemplating the last 3 weeks, but I’m not sure I have the brainpower just yet. And I hope to have news on two long-standing projects of mine soon. Maybe even video to show.
If I owe you an email (or worse yet, a physical book) please re-send what I’m meant to reply to. I’ve got a big list, and things at the top get more attention
Hope all’s well out there. It’s balancing out in here.
