Water Damage

Well. The unthinkable has happened.
Water got spilled on the MacBook.
I know. I know. Weep for me.
I was putting Owen into his high chair and his leg knocked over a glass of water we were about to share with our lunch and there it went, right over and although it appeared to me that very little got IN to the MacBook, I guess it was enough because my magic box- she is not working.
(Magic Box is what I call my MacBook. Get your mind out of the gutter.)
Right now it is upside down with a gentle fan blowing over it. I am in despair. Really. I am. I mean- what if it's dead?
I did this once before and it was SOAKED that time and after a night of drying, it was fine. But I don't know. I do not know.

I am writing this on Mr. Moon's computer. It is a Gateway. He likes it fine. He plays poker on it and researches things he's interested in online and sometimes reads my blog. He does not, however, have an entire community of people whom he stays in touch with through a Magic Box. No. He does not.
And he doesn't give a fig about writing. Except notes. He writes wonderful, lovely notes on post-its and index cards and I love that about him. He is an exceptional husband in many ways.
He let me use his computer and I appreciate that so much. I would not be as gracious. See- that's the thing about my MacBook. It is mine. It is one of the very few things in this world that I do not really have to share with anyone. Oh, I have shared it and that's fine but mostly, it is mine. All mine. And it's filled with old novels and started novels and short stories and oh yeah, let's not even mention the ten thousand pictures and nine thousand of them are of Owen.
I suppose I should be panicking. Actually, I have a lot of the writing on flash drive. The pictures? No. Did I ever get that external hard drive I said I was going to get?
Hell no.
And tomorrow will tell the tale. I will know whether I have screwed the pooch and fried the Book or if has recovered.
Meanwhile, if you don't see me around the hood the way you usually do- well, you'll know.

My Magic Box. The thing I hardly even call a computer. The thing I treat like a baby, craddle in my arms when I carry it, never (okay, hardly ever up until today) leave a beverage next to it because a dog might jump up and knock it over, the thing I put in the center of the dining room table at night so that if a dog should jump on the table he won't knock it off, the thing I really do love as much as any THING on this earth (and yes, I know it's only a thing) may live or may die.
It's battery has almost died already but I just keep it plugged in and don't mind doing that a bit. It is pretty old for a computer. I think it may be about to be four. And it has been fabulous. I haven't had it into the shop in years.
Years.

Well, we shall see.
And I know that in the grand scheme of things, a computer isn't that important.
But I also know that a Magic Box sort of is. To me, anyway. It is the channel through which I am able to stay sane with words and with communication and it is mine and I love it and I hope that tomorrow it will be alive.

Dog-Related Disaster Averted

The other night I got home from play practice (and there may be a blog here soon about what it looks like when two middle-aged women bend over and slurp together into a microphone to make the sound-effect for a giant amoeba) and had eaten my supper and had just settled down on the couch with my laptop to see what was happening in the world and maybe do a little e-bay search for Coach leather backpacks, vintage, which is sort of a hobby of mine, when the dogs started arguing fiercely about a bone.
I quickly set my laptop down on the coffee table in order to grab my smallest dog, Zeke, before my next-to-the-largest dog, Buster, ate him, but my husband beat me to the quickly-escalating violence and picked up Buster. Unfortunately the dogs were attached via Buster's teeth and Zeke's forearm and as I tried to pry the teeth from the forearm, Zeke dropped like a rock and hit the coffee table, sending a glass of water flying across the table, dumping its contents onto my laptop.
You knew this was coming, right?
And here's what you have to know- my laptop is my baby. I treat it as gently as I would a real baby, always handling it with kid gloves, never leaving it plugged in when I leave the house so that if a storm should magically spring up while I'm gone it won't get its little logic board zapped, and never, ever leaving it near a glass of anything.
This is not my first laptop and I have learned all of these lessons the hard way.
But in the heat of the growls and biting and barking, I just set it down right next to that glass of water and that was all it took for the unintentional water-boarding to occur.
Being as I have four dogs and only one laptop, I immediately grabbed it up, ignoring the smallest dog and raced to the kitchen to get a dry, clean cloth to begin some sort of futile rescue on it. My husband followed me, grabbed the computer and held it upside down and began to shake and pound on it as if delivering a sort of clumsy CPR and Heimlich maneuver to a choking child. I watched in horror, quivering and trembling as water poured out of its precious keyboard, and all I could think was, "Dear Lord, he's killing it."
At that point, I remembered the dog and went to check on him. He appeared to be fine, although he did have a few small puncture wounds in his leg. Big deal. He's always getting beat up by Buster and he's always lived.
My laptop, however, had never had anything poured into it and of course it had gone all-blank-screened by this time. No vital signs at all.
I removed the battery and very gently and with very low heat, attempted to dry it out for about an hour with a blow dryer. My husband and I set it up in front of a fan and a small space heater, put Neosporin on the dog's leg and then we all went to bed, exhausted from the emotional distress of watching a laptop possibly die, knowing we'd done all we could and that only time would tell.
The next morning I was in a state of high anxiety but I waited until I'd read the paper and had some coffee and my husband said the laptop was as dry as it was going to get before I put the battery back in and tried to start it up. With my husband watching anxiously over my shoulder, I held my breath and hit the "on" button and I've never been more thrilled in my life to hear that sweet Mac chime and see it start to boot, just like normal. Before we knew it, everything had sprung to life- my desktop and all the icons- and I ran it through a few tests and tried to type and go online and everything, everything worked. Its magic was intact.
Phew.
So here's what I'm saying- no matter how careful you are, unforeseen disasters can occur and if you're lucky and these disasters involve water and not something like, oh- rum and coke, and if you have a beautiful little machine like say- a MacBook, a little water down the keyboard won't kill it and you will live to blog again.
And by the way, Zeke is fine and isn't even limping and we've thrown all the bones away.
That's him in the picture above which I took with the nifty camera that comes in the MacBook and which still, as you can see, works fine.