It should come as a surprise/relevant concern to no one that my laptop – aka Stickerbot 2000, aka Grandpa Murderhorn, aka The Machine That Has Died A Thousand Deaths – has finally kicked the bucket. I was Internetting this morning and opened my iTunes, which shut down both my browser session and my iTunes request. Okay, I thought, let’s try this again. I re-opened by browser session and re-opened my iTunes. Same thing, only this time about a hundred Windows error messages popped up. So I shut down, because I hate when people ask me if I’ve tried to reboot.

When I attempted to reboot, I received the following screen:

It’s not the blue screen of death, but this is not my first rodeo with this laptop; after all, it is nearly seven years old and we have been through some shit together. So I did what I always do when this kind of thing happens. I texted Mike, and then I felt guilty about texting Mike.

(Actually, this is not an entirely accurate version of events. Yes, I texted Mike and felt guilty about it, but first I e-mailed my editor from my phone to tell him that my review of last night’s show would be late, and I attached the photo of my laptop screen as evidence. CONGRATULATIONS ON GETTING AN IPHONE, SELF!)

While waiting for Mike to respond, I googled the error. According to the Internet, I would need to do a manual reboot. While I’m sure this is a how-to I could have found on my own, I am nothing if not hesitant to further fuck things up, so I continued waiting for Mike, who told me that my drive had either failed or was failing, and that a manual reboot would not likely make everything all better.

Damn. I said goddamn. So I called Graham to ask for his laptop password, and then I went to Best Buy’s site and finally ordered a new laptop for pickup later today. The good news is that laptops are considerably cheaper than they were when I bought one the last time. The bad news is that I spent about $600 and some change that I wasn’t planning to spend. It’s not like I don’t have the money. I do, but the possibility of Seattle is causing me to go into “let’s pretend we’re broke” mode and save every red cent. Mike said that he has a device that could help to copy all the data from my old machine to my new one assuming the drive is not completely toast yet, which will help a lot in making me feel better about all the music, photos, and writing that I haven’t yet been able to copy to an external hard drive (basically anything added to it after September, which may not be a lot for some people but I work in music, write like a maniac, and spend way too much time finding hilarious things online).

I needed a new laptop, anyway. I knew this. I knew my old one couldn’t live forever under its armor of stickers and Pop-Tart crumbs, and, as I told Mike, this situation has given me the impetus to replace an old as balls machine. It’s also made me thankful that even though I haven’t backed up since September, I did recently copy my most wanted recipes saved to my favorites into a just-arrived recipe book, and again, man, am I glad I got an iPhone.

Also I’m spending some computer-free time taking my nephew to the playground today, which is nice in terms of spending time together but exhausting in terms of hearing “watch me!” about a thousand times (dude, I’ve been watching, get back to me when you learn to do a backflip).