Sorry… been a bad few days.

Started mid-week… Got some bad news (I can’t really talk about.)

Then it started snowing. Never a good thing here in the Pacific Northwest.

Then my laptop died. The old G4 I’ve been driving for over 4 years. I installed the 10.5.6 update and it just rolled over and died. Kernel panic, SPOD, you name it. I tried restoring from backup. I tried re-installing. I even “nuked & paved”… SPOD & Kernel Panic. Sigh. It frustrated me so much that after the last failed re-install I applied some “percussive maintenance” and then tossed it across the room. As you can imagine, it did not take that very well.

I awoke this morning at 4, to over a foot of new snow. The Jetta spent the night in the front of the house, uncovered, as Sue’s CRD and the Jag are sleeping in the garage these days. The boys had a 12:40 flight to catch at Sea-Tac, 70 miles away. I started shovelling out the VW from the drift. I started right up despite the cold. I let it warm up while I got the Liberty CRD out and used it to clear a path down the 1/3rd of a mile down to the road for the Jetta. A couple of laps up and down the drive cleared the snow sufficiently. I packed a shovel, some gloves, and boots, along with the boys’ luggage into the car. The boys awakened and fed, we headed off towards the airport around 8. Once down off the hill and onto the freeway the roads were in much better shape. Still snow covered, but plowed, sanded, and well packed. We were able to move along at a good rate. The snow started again in earnest when we reached downtown Seattle. We arrived in a blizzard, with 2 hours to spare, got them checked in, and then I headed off to the Apple Store at Southcenter to pick up a new laptop.

The parking lot was empty, so I had a little fun doing handbrake turns and generally hooning about for a bit to improve my mood.

Grabbed a MacBook Pro. Most people would be thrilled about this. I was just grumpy.

Drove to my office through and around closed freeways, accidents, jack-knifed semis, and idiots.

Spent the rest of my day configuring a new machine and transferring my data to it. I have plenty of backups, and was able to restore an image of my previous laptop to an external hard drive yesterday. Moving to the new machine SHOULD be easy with Migration Assistant? Forget it. Failed twice.

Had to move everything over by hand. Still dealing with the fallout of that. iPhoto is the issue I’m dealing with at the moment. Sigh.