Fiber Monday: Cyberstruggles

 

In Which Today Was Very Difficult

This morning, I woke up before 10AM (around 8:30 I believe) and found that I'd unplugged my laptop in my sleep. I've developed something of a (not very healthy) habit of falling asleep watching YouTube videos with my laptop on my lap in bed. My poor laptop was quite old and had already had one battery fail completely. I replaced that battery with one at 76% of its life expectancy and... well...

Something went terribly wrong.

It's my partner's birthday today, by the way, so if you see them around the internet or you read their blog Attack The Stack, then please offer your congratulations! I'm dating an awesome person, so I decided to post on their Facebook wall just how I feel and offer my best wishes etc, and halfway through my deeply heartfelt message...

Everything stopped working. My laptop 100% froze - no hard drive activity, no fans, no amount of ctrl+alt+del or tapping the power button worked. I had to unplug the laptop once more and pull the battery, which if you do any IT work, you know that's a BIG NO NO. But desperate times called for desperate... what? Measures? WHO SAID THAT?!?!?! (inside joke, don't worry about it).

I pressed power again and... nothing. The internet and power lights were on, but the screen stayed black, the fans spun once and stopped, no hard drive activity.

I am not ashamed to say that I absolutely panicked. It wouldn't even be the first laptop I bricked, but it's Pandemic Times and I spend roughly 75-85% of my days on my computer, whether it's listening to music or reading or playing games or checking patterns. I freaked out. Luckily, MLK Day is a holiday for hospital IT guys (I know, it doesn't really make sense, but I'm grateful for it today) so my dad, who is the Computer God in this family, was home. Unfortunately, he was also on the phone and my family has this condition called "I'm Talking And I Can't Shut Up", so he was going to be in that conversation for... quite a while.

I tried everything I could think of while I was downstairs.

Except for the thing he suggested when he walked in and saw me struggling.

"Did you try taking the battery out, plugging it in, and trying to turn it on?"

Guys. It worked.

But! That dear old laptop has a very wobbly AC port and I knew that I couldn't function with it like that, so it was now time for an upgrade.

Which is a longwinded way of letting you know I'm typing this from a very nice not-that-new laptop. Like most things I own that I like, it's second-hand, refurbished, and my dad and I rebuilt it over the course of the afternoon. As you may have guessed, this left almost no time for crochet, so there's no progress from today to share, but I can still give you a picture of how far I've gotten since last week in general on the stocking!

Roku Remote for Scale

So there you have it - a massive, truly HUGE stocking! I have one last design band to put on and I am planning to put my nibling's name on in cross stitch. I don't put info about minors on my blog, though, so I'll show you the finished stocking sans name :)

It's gonna be so freaking huge...

The whole length of the Red Heart Super Saver skein is actually sitting in the foot right now.

Alright. I'm pretty pooped, so I'm gonna finish my last cup of tea for the day (more Meyer Lemon - I'll try to do a review some Sunday of all the teas I got for Christmas!) and get ready for my partner's birthday bash online :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC