And the day is pretty much shot ...

[hrj]

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.