I'm sorry for my sporadic posting as of late.  It is likely to continue.  Jan (the laptop) died -- the Rocket Scientist spent about twelve hours over the weekend troubleshooting and replacing the hard drive (which means taking the darn thing completely apart -- great design there, Apple) not once but twice (the first drive turned out to be defective) and troubleshooting the battery.

Right now everything is flaky.  System Preferences won't open, mail won't work.  Even Bejeweled keeps dying.  I am hoping that cleaning everything out, reloading the operating system and doing a simple drag and drop rather than using the restore software will clear everything up, but the replacement disks for the operating system (which have mysteriously disappeared and which had to be reordered) won't be here for a few days.  And it will take me a full day to get all the files back on line.

For a while I thought I had lost everything, although I thought I had backed up recently.  (Turns out I had not backed up since 10/29.  Bad, bad me.)  I thought I had lost all my job search work, and more importantly, in terms of sunk time and irretrievable effort, the trivia book I had been working sporadically on since 2006.  (I have not done anything with it in at least a year, but I always knew it was there and have been thinking of getting back to working on it. Arguably, once I get the references in shape, I have enough material to actually produce a book, although I have less material than my goal, which was 1000 questions.  I have about 725.)  For a little while, I could not decide whether to throw up or cry.  Fortunately, I have been able to locate both the book and some of my resumes and cover letters.

So, I will have occasional access to other computers, and hopefully at least Firefox will run on this computer.  (Word also seems to run.  Hopefully it will keep doing so.) I never thought I'd say it, but thank God for Gmail.  But I am not holding my breath -- I expect Firefox to die any moment.

So, you'll see me when you see me.  I hope I can get to my post-in-progress, regarding the show Criminal Minds and the challenge to Prop 8 (for you lawyers out there, it's actually a post about standing in death penalty cases).  Not to mention my usual musings on the season.

I think I can get one more post out this evening. 

Take care, folks.