I'm blogging from a borrowed computer tonight due to a slight mishap here at Casa de Jenn last night. We've had a leak in the upstairs ceiling for a little over a year. Not a bad leak, it was pretty intermittent for a long time, but we told the landlord about it shortly after it first started.
A year ago.
He figured that the roof is pretty new, so it was probably just a gutter backing up and said that he would come over to look at it, he just never quite got around to it. (There's a lot of that going around, as you'll see.)
About three or four months ago we started enclosing notes with the rent check telling him that the leak had gotten worse, it was now leaking in two or three spots, that pieces of the plaster are falling down, and the paint is bubbling where the water is running down the wall under the paint on either side of the window. We included pictures.
Since the leak is directly above my sofa, this means every time it rains I have to bring up somethng to catch the water in and then cover the sofa with big plastic trash bags. It's really quite an attractive decorative statement. Of course late August is thunderstorm season, so I'm spending a lot of time with black plastic trash bags spread around my sitting room, which brings us to last night's lesson.
I was using my laptop table as a work surface to make seom stitch markers, so I moved my laptop to the arm of the sofa and had beads and supplies spread along the seat while I worked. After a while, my mother called me to come down for dinner and while we were eating of course, the rain started. We checked the downstairs windows to make sure it wasn't raining in and I said I would check the upstairs windows when I went back upstairs but since it doesn't usually rain in up there, I wasn't really worried enough to rush.
I completely forgot about both the leak and the fact that I had left my laptop sitting on the sofa directly under the leaky spot.
By the time I got upstairs it was entirely too late. I noticed that the couch was wet right away and then I realized that the computer was soaked and I panicked. I went running back downstairs - without any pants (the upstairs was originally attic space, it's much hotter up there than it is in the rest of the house, so I usually take my shorts off when I watch TV and just sit around in my underwear and a tank top. That's right - Revel in the class.) and started literally pouring water out of the computer then started trying to dry it out with a blow dryer. I don't know if it worked because I haven't tried to turn it on yet today, but before I unplugged it and turned it off last night I was getting the Blue Screen of Death, so I'm not holding out a huge amount of hope.
The laptop is actually about five or six years old and I have been planning to get a new one, I just wasn't planning to do it this week, which I guess downgrades this from The End of the World to A Huge Pain in the Behind. The real problem is that I haven't backed anything up in about - well, ever. It's one of those things that I keep meaning to get around to. I know there are programs that go in automatically and keep a backup copy online somewhere - I've been meaning to get around to that too. (Noticing the trend yet?)
Originally the only thing that I thought about was the music that I've downloaded on iTunes, but I know from the last time my computer crashed (yes, it has crashed before, which makes my failure to back up even more head-slappingly stupid than you thought it was originally) that I can load purchased songs straight from my ipod and everything else that's on cd I can just reload, so I wasn't really worried.
Then I remembered that I have photographs on there. Those I really can't replace, but a lot of the ones I really wanted I had printed a few months ago, so again, not really a tragedy.
Then I remembered my extensive porn collection (to the unitiated, they probably just look like knitting patterns). They were mostly downloaded from online sites, but not all of them were in my Ravelry queue, so I don't know where I got them or how to find them again.
Oops.
Well, considering that I'm currently trying to purge my house of crap maybe this is a good thing. I can look at it as a clean start.....
Okay. No.
But on the bright side, when I do get a computer back I can go browsing for patterns again to replace them all.
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