Brutie and the Dell – Photo: L. Weikel

Killed It

Two weeks ago, I lamented the toll taken by Pacha and Brutus’s zealous antics (aka ‘zoomies’) chasing each other from one room to the other on a rather dependable schedule every night. Streaking like lightning around the couch and threading the needle of other obstacles, they got snagged on the charger cord of my laptop and swept it onto the floor with a thud. I feared they’d killed it.

I was relieved to report that the initial diagnosis was a simple need for a new charger. It appeared that the charger had bent and simply needed to be replaced, since the experts at D’town Tech were able to plug it in and boot it back up. All was well that ended well. I ordered a new charger and counted my lucky stars.

Well, it turns out my celestial ciphering may have been a bit premature.

Resisting the Truth

When the new charger arrived from Amazon, I immediately plugged it into the machine and hoped it would charge overnight. When I awakened, it still refused to boot up.

Resisting the truth of what was playing out before my eyes, I told myself the old battery had been drained for so long that it finally gave up the ghost. All would be better when the new battery arrived and the experts replaced it.

Yeah. I wish.

On Election Day, Karl dropped the laptop back off at D’town Tech for replacement of its battery. Sadly, word came the next day that my Dell, while initially booting up just fine, after about 10 minutes was persistently seizing and then crashing. The cause was eluding them. The prognosis was dire.

From Bad to Worse

It’s funny; I look back on some of my earliest posts in this long saga, and I see that ten days into my 1111 Devotion, my Dell XPS went on the fritz. I documented my adventures with customer service (I had a premium warranty on the machine) as they stretched into Days 14 and 15 – ultimately resulting in replacement of the motherboard. Because my Dell crapped out on me in those early days of getting this discipline off the ground, I decided to write all my blog posts on my MacBook Air. And that’s how it’s been ever since.

But that doesn’t negate the fact that I use the Dell for so many of my day-to-day business and record-keeping activities. All of our financials, my legal work, etc., is on my Dell.

So you might imagine how deflating it was to discover that the hard drive was so damaged that they can’t even retrieve my data. They effectively killed it.

While I did back up a lot on an external hard drive, I didn’t update the backup nearly as recently as I should have. As I now wish I had.

An interesting ‘coincidence’ is how this issue came up almost exactly as many days into my 1111 Devotion as I am away from completing this Act of Power. It’s odd. Two weeks into it; and now two weeks from ending it. One thing I’m observing? I’m much less invested in what I’ve ‘lost’ than I would have been three years ago.

That in itself is worthy of contemplation and reflection.

Their first prey – “Killed it!” – Photo: L. Weikel

(T-14)