drive

Last night, amidst the feeble attempts to do work while manically checking election results, the hard drive of my laptop began its death throes. While I was able to access web pages (albeit slowly), I was unable to save files or send emails. Happily, I knew I had backed up only a couple of days before, and what work I’d done in the time since was mostly things like lab meeting notes and emails, most of which could probably be reconstructed.

When the very exciting election results came rolling in, it felt like everything–all the angst and the effort–was worth it. I was willing to count the loss of my hard drive and of my day’s productivity as acceptable sacrifices for the greater good.

Of course, my hard drive was not really a blood sacrifice to the cause of the election. Just a weird coincidence. And happily, I live with someone who is expert in dealing with computer trauma. Today, John went out and got me a new hard drive, and got it up and running with all my data, restored from my back-up, by dinner time. In the meantime, I had dug out my old laptop, a slow beast with a tendency to overheat when working with large media files (which I need to do for much of my work).

Here it is evening, and I am back on my proper laptop, with its shiny new hard drive. (Not that I can see it. I’m just sort of assuming that it’s shiny. Maybe even *sparkly*.) And I have to get moving on some work stuff for Friday. But it would seem that I have lost a good deal of my drive to do so.

I’m feeling downright zonked, possibly coming down with (yet another) cold. I think that part of this is post-election exhaustion.

I also am trying to decide about what to do tomorrow, as I had planned to drive into Cambridge to see a talk my advisor is giving at MIT. It would be good if I were there, but I don’t really *need* to be. And now that I’ve lost a solid day’s work time to hard drive failure, I could really use those 2+ hours that would be eaten up by the drive. Also, the weather is icky. We have had our first snow of the season, and a mix of driving rain and snow are forecast for tomorrow.

With this change in the weather, my thoughts are with those who are still without adequate power and shelter in New York and New Jersey. There have been several local drives to collect for victims of Sandy, and I am investigating what contributions will be most useful. (I hope to be mindful of not being part of the “disaster after the disaster,” resulting from well-meaning people giving a flood of items that aren’t needed.) I have also been very impressed by the Occupy Sandy Amazon registry, where volunteers on the ground in New York are requesting specific needed items. As the wind blew through my too-thin-for-the-day coat today, I thought of those who lost their homes, and those who are still in their homes but without power, and those who are working heroically to help them. I wish them warmth and shelter and safety.