I had a blog post all written and ready to post that would have been a personal progress report as well as a report on the current state of Twenty One Palaces, along with a few other things, but you’re not getting that yet. Yesterday, I had quite the emergency.

My main computer (the one I’m typing this on, suddenly died overnight.

Figuring out what happened (hard drive got fucked) which easy/quick actions were not going to fix anything (let’s run Disk Utility repair function on literally everything) and which long term, hours-long processes would actually get things up and running (erase entire hard drive and reinstall everything from Time Machine) cost me an entire day.

Frustrating. But you know what? The expense of having a separate Time Machine external drive and the time I have spent over many years keeping it functional really paid off. That time and money reduced what could have been a huge calamity into a very frustrating day.

But now I’m on notice about this desktop Mac. I bought it in 2017, and I had hoped to get more time from it. I use it for just about everything except writing fiction, and that includes research, prescription refills, grocery orders, book promo, whatever.

But money is tight right now. I’d really like to it to keep running for a good many more years.

And then there’s my stupid, treacherous body. I’ve mentioned before that I have minor medical issues that are having much larger effects on my health. The new medication that was supposed to turn things around hasn’t had an effect, although we’ll now be increasing the frequency of the dosage and crossing our fingers.

But it’s these little defects that sometimes lead to complete failure, and I feel like that could describe the path we’re all on. My desktop spent all day on life support, and I sat next to it knowing I could be next.

The little laptop I write on is 11 years old (knock on wood), so really, failure for all three of us–writing machine, surfing machine, living machine–feels pretty tenuous.

Anyway, I’m putting morbid thoughts aside. I have a day’s work to catch up on, but that blog post will go live soonish. Tell your loved ones how you feel and back up your data.