Finally Back

For once in my embarrassingly long history of blogging reticence, my reason for not posting wasn't some vague "I'm sooo busy watching marathons of New Girl and The Mindy Project on Hulu" or "I'm saaaaad, I don't want to talk about it," but an actual technological impediment to being able to get onto this site and write.

Back in March, I was home sick from work with pretty intense vertigo (long story, but I was at the point of taking Dramamine and wearing Sea-Bands around my apartment), and I had my beloved MacBook Pro on my table, trying to do some work (yes really, I had our CRM website open, it was nuts). I decided to microwave some Chinese leftovers for lunch (it was a sick day - don't look at me like that) and as I was carrying them to the table, I got overwhelmingly dizzy and felt myself swooning. Not wanting to knock out my teeth on the table or chair or otherwise damage my face or head, I tried to shove the plate I was carrying onto the table to get my hands free, and of course I upended an entire container of sweet and sour sauce directly onto the keyboard of my laptop.

As I hit the ground muttering a string of profanities, I distinctly remember thinking, "Seriously, Vicki? The stickiest substance known to mankind?!?!"

I won't belabor the rest of the saga now because I plan to write a triumphant "How I Recovered My Beloved MacBook" post, just as soon as I get around to recovering it. The relevant details for now are that it kept working long enough to back up all my files and to watch episodes of New Girl and The Mindy Project on Hulu while I angrily took apart all the keys and researched how to clean it (didn't work). Eventually I took it to the Apple store, and they wanted $800 to open it up because they assumed liquid damage would have reached the logic board. Furious and penniless, I took it back home and got brave, taking the whole thing apart myself (good God, all the teensy tiny screws!), discovered that the liquid damage had NOT reached the logic board or breached the glorified plastic sticker sealing the keyboard portion from the delicate stuff underneath (disheartening design flaw much?), and I separated it into about fifty thousand parts with the intent to clean it all and put it back together.

Which is where it still is because good Lord, sweet and sour sauce is SO sticky and it is such a daunting prospect to put all those tiny pieces back together and pray it works.

I started using the Lenovo X60s that I had from 2007, which had been banished to an armoire in my parents' house after the hard drive crashed completely and irrecoverably in the middle of my graduate thesis. I completely wiped and reformatted its hard drive, agonized over having to go back to a Windows machine (it's dreadful), and daily think how much I dislike its buzzing ineffective fans, tiny blurry screen, and utter unreliability (though I shouldn't say anything too cruel since it is, for now, my only functional computer).

(This is, admittedly, more of a saga than I intended, sorry.)

So while all of my files are presumably safely stored on an external hard drive, I was not able to back up any of my browser settings because bloody Chrome kept having Flash-induced hissy fits and crashing like mad. "Who cares about bookmarks?" I thought angrily, "that's what Google is for!"

But I had all of my passwords to all of my websites saved in my browser and evidently nowhere else. Or maybe somewhere, on a file that I can't access because I don't even have Excel on this Lenovo. That shouldn't seem like such a big deal, right? That's what password recovery links are for, right?

Hahaha, no. I had done a lot of whacky things when I was first installing MovableType, and it's been... an ordeal. I also let all of my web hosting expire for a little bit (whoops), then had to recover my domain, and on and on.

The happy conclusion is that after quite a bit of back end database reconfiguring and a healthy amount of cursing, I have regained access to my own blog. Hooray!

And I plan to actually post more than once every few months because I have also been fixing a lot of back end things in the rest of my life too.