cussing, spitting, thing

It's a technojinx, that's what it is. Somewhere in my generally user-friendly, cookery-loving, innocently not-quite-in-this-universe aura is a fatal flaw that causes computers to randomly explode whenever I come near them. I mean, even Oblivion is crashing four or five times as often for me as it does for the Evil Landlord, although that could also have something to do with the fact that I keep accidentally walking through my horse*.

The Death Of The Motherboard a couple of weeks back was quite enough heart palpitation for one computer-year, but clearly karmic build-up had not been expiated. On Thursday my hard drive died. No amount of kicking, swearing and invocation of demon gods would allow it to boot up. Encapsulated on said hard drive is my revised thesis, work on several encyclopedia entries, and a great deal of information I do not at all care to lose. All but the most recent work is actually backed up on campus, but this does not include the file full of notes representing two months' worth of Disney research which I need to beat into shape to make an actual entry. There was, as you might guess, much wailing and gnashing of knees.

Fortunately the Evil Landlord leaped madly into the breach in his usual fashion and installed his own old hard drive, thus executing a neat echo of precisely the manoevre we used for the dead motherboard. (Memo to self, make creme caramel for Evil Landlord). Slaved to the new hard drive, mine can actually be read, although it has large holes in some of the data, including bang in the middle of the sixth episode of Doctor Who. (Woe! Woe!) Fortunately, however, thesis and encyclopedia entries are unflawed. What I have lost, with pinpoint accuracy, is the data file for my Thunderbird inbox, which means if you've sent me an e-mail recently to which I have not yet responded, please resend it, it has vanished irretrievably into the nether regions of aetheric hell. It's been a pretty weird day, trying to restore to my computer all my programs, settings and what have you. Talk about identity slippage.

Of course, my techno-jinx has had definite assistance of late from some sort of all-embracingly nasty astrological conjunction, causing not only computer crashes, but break-ups, cookery disasters and the theft, last night, of jo&stv's car, the famed Roachmobile of legend and song. I thus feel impelled to add my mite of joy to the unrelieved gloom by mentioning the happy little revelation accorded last night by watching Goblet of Fire again in the company of a sadly visa-stressed starmadeshadow. Did anyone else notice that Mad-Eye Moody's weird Scottish outfit for the Yule ball includes, in a gesture making for slashy swooning in all directions, a sporran made from a flayed white ferret? Heh.

* In other silly Oblivion news, the horse is buggy enough that its current stabling plan involves leaving it levitating outside my front door, stuck through the porch roof so you can only see its feebly galloping hooves and whatever the bottom part of a horse's leg is called. (Fetlock? Pastern? Something technical which no amount of Dick Francis is going to make me recall). Words cannot express how ridiculous it looks.