On hold

Sitting here waiting on hold whle the AppleCare support person consults with a higher power regarding my laptop's unexpected catatonia. It was fine this morning at the coffee shop. Then just when I was setting up to start sifting through the cookbooks (which involves marking them off in a new column of the database as "deaccessioned") I get an "invalid memory access" message and can get no farther than "open firmware" (which I've never seen before).

Well, after half an hour with tech support, we not much further along, although some interesting things happen when I remove the extra RAM chip (i.e., without it, all I get is a black screen -- no "open firmware", no nothing) but put it back in and at least I'm back to the "illegal instruction" types of messages. So it's off to the friendly neighborhood Apple Genius Bar to see if they can make heads or tails of it -- otherwise I'll have to send it in for major surgery.

Sigh. At least I have two computers so I won't go completely mental.

And the day is pretty much shot ...

No luck on an easy fix for the laptop. The good news is that it may not involve the hard drive, so I may not lose anything. There isn't much unrecoverable on the laptop, although it's annoying to figure out which recent e-mail I hadn't gotten around to responding to and the like. And then there's last evening's cat-vacuuming exercise: while moving the fabric bins into the spare room, I decided it was time to start a catalog of yardage (just the stuff with usable uncut lengths -- not the scraps), which woud be entirely gone if they have to mess with the hard drive. Annoying, but not tragic. But for the good news, the roofer just called and he can fit me in tomorrow. Yay.