Welcome to the first, February, Friday- Fess-up Post
This week, it would be more like a Frazzled Friday than anything else. As I type this, I’m sitting in the office with the door closed, the heater going and all the dogs in here with me trying to keep warm. I’m closing in on 24 hours without heat or hot water. and I’m looking at, at least Monday before life might return to something resembling normal.
Speaking of normalcy (or the lack thereof), I discovered that the battery in the new (Just over a month old) laptop is dead. No warnings about the power being low, nothing. In fact, right now, the battery meter is showing that the battery is fully charged. If I were to unplug the power cable, the laptop would shut off. Period.
I found out about this yesterday.
See, I ran into a bunch of local writers this year at ConFusion and, as it turns out, a few of them have been meeting pretty regularly at a coffee shop that I drive past darn near every day*. Yesterday I took the laptop in, paid my table fee,** and sat down to write. Part of getting set up is unwrapping the power cord, and plugging in. It’s like reflex for me.
So I’m sitting there, working and folks start to trickle in. I figure I’ll hop up and join them, but I don’t want to bother with shutting down and restarting, so I pull the power cord out.
One inert laptop. And I’d been writing.
Not good.
I plug in, power on, and fire up Scrivener.
The scene that I’d been working on was gone. The entire scene – even the stuff that I’d been working on that morning.
Really not good. Sure, it wasn’t like the entire book was gone, but still it was about a 1000 words.
I knew that Scrivener made backups, so a little bit of Google-Fu later and I knew where those back-up files were stored.
In the end, I’d lost close to two hours of work.
After I moved to join the rest of the group, and plugged in, I was able to recreate some of that before it was time to go (and discover the lack of heat in the house)
But this was a new laptop. Granted, I don’t normally go places where I’ll need to run off the battery, but when I need the battery, I need the battery. That means that tomorrow, I’ll call the store and see what they can do for me.
I’ll have to people, people.
So a wonky laptop, the day-job, no heat in the house, and I’m here in a closed room with a bored border collie. Life is feeling all out of sorts at the moment.
But we’ll make it work, and things will be back to normal soon.
Here’s hoping that you haven’t been as out of sorts as I have this week.
Be sure to check back Sunday!
*Conventions are often well worth the price of admission in this way.
**Bought a coffee – a nice French vanilla eye-opener.