"I drink with DAMN, I'M DEAD!"

This has been a tough week, and it ain't over yet.

For a lot of you, it's probably pretty much over. Friday afternoon, everything winding down. Go home, have a nice cup of tea or a glass of wine or a bottle of beer, enjoy your weekend. For me, it won't really end until I finish my homework for class tomorrow morning, get through class tomorrow morning, and then wait for Eric Stevens to finish his assignment, too, due Monday.

But those little items aren't stressing me out like they normally would on a Friday afternoon. Nope. Compared to the last five days, those are a cake walk, because on Sunday night (shortly after posting my last entry, actually), I spilled an entire cup of tea -- piping hot and with milk and sugar -- into the keyboard of my laptop.

I didn't sleep well that night, wondering if the innards would dry, if the hard drive would survive, if all the writing I'd done in the last two years would be lost!

Well, not two years. I mean, I have backed up now and then. But plenty of work that I really, really loved, including the latest complete draft of YA MS the Third . . .

Beth did some quick research, and I removed the hard drive and whatever else I could safely unbolt from the underside, then opened the laptop and laid it on a towel, per some instructions on the web. Then, I proceeded to not sleep at all.

At 3:30 in the morning, I got up, thinking maybe the thing was dry now, and got it put together and plugged in and pressed the power button. The Dell start-up screen appeared! The little loading bar got longer and longer! It's working, it's working!

Then nothing. A flash of light and blackness. Total. System. Failure.

I blacked out.

The next thing I remember is waking up under the dining room table with a pot on my head.

Not really. But at 7:59 that morning, Sam and I were at the local computer repair shop. They laughed at me, then pantsed me, then laughed again. Then they said, "We'll call you to tell you it's beyond hope in three days."

Or it would have been, if the hard drive hadn't been spared by some miracle. The thing was bone dry. The folks at the repair shop removed the hard drive, encased it in adamantium (I assume), and turned it into an external drive. All my files -- WIPs, invoices, photos and videos of Sam, completed work -- are safe.

Of course, the motherboard on the old laptop is shot. The thing is beyond repair. So I've gone ahead and bought a new laptop. The amazing thing is that it's a better, faster laptop than my old one, and cost me like 300 bucks less. So that's nice.

And hey, tax write-off!