I was wrong

So I was wrong about the flooring disaster. It wasn't that it started pouring rain as soon as I had furniture sitting in the backyard. It wasn't that the flooring company had drastically underestimated how long the job would take. No, it was that when they started pulling out the existing tile, they found dry rot. *whimper* I haven't even been home to see it yet because I'm spending my lunch hour getting that sharp point on my new filling ground down. Oh, and the flooring people don't do dry rot. They said, "Bye, call us when you've got it fixed."

Update: I swung by the house after getting the tooth fixed. (Conversation with dentist: D: That's just your tooth. Me: It wasn't that pointy when I came in yesterday. D: No, that's just the cusp of your tooth. Me: Trust me, I know my mouth. D: (scrapes violently with scaling tool) Oh, I see! There we go! Is that better? Me: I told you I know my mouth.) Yes, there's some dry rot at the corners of the sliding glass door. It seems fairly confined to a manageable area, though. (And I can see how it happened -- it's the previous owner/remodeler's trick of putting the metal flashing outside the house siding so that rain water is channeled into a crevice between the flashing and the boards and sits there. So I guess I shift the house projects into rot-removal mode. Might as well find a specialist and have him/her check over the whole house while I'm at it.

Shift into reverse

Tonight's chores were pretty much just a reverse of last nights: move the couches, bookshelf, and drafting table back into the now stripped living room; wheel the computer cart back out of the spare room and retrieve the tv. Who knows when I'll be ready to call the flooring people back again. I signed up with a "contractor referrel" service which spat out one lonely match for my job and then indicated that he wasn't available at the moment. Next I try the neighborhood e-mail list, although I'm sort of aiming for someone who specializes in rot repair. ( pictures cut because I care about your page layout )

The laptop, it turns out, is not entirely fixed. It was behaving fine while I was reinstalling software and whatnot, but then this morning when I was using it for e-mail ('cause the desktop was shoved away) it did the "gray screen of death" thing ("you must reboot your computer"). Hmm. More testing. Passes all the hardware tests with flying colors. No problems when simply reading e-mail, only when I'm typing a reply. Possibly a write-to-disk issue? But I haven't saved it yet -- does it do auto-draft-saves? No problems when playing a solitaire game. Try a test Word document. Crashes when I type in the name to save. Hmm. Try another program. Saves a test document no problem. Try Word again -- saves no problem. Back to e-mail: no problems while composing a dummy e-mail. Then I suddenly notice a correlation. It crashes when I rest weight on my left palm on the case to type. Re-boot. Press a finger on the left-front part of the case. Crash. Yup, the problem is a purely mechanical response to compression of the computer case in a particular region. (So it doesn't happen when I'm just reading or plaing games, which only involves the right hand.) Guess it's back to the shop.