Saturday 6 May 2017

Ankles, eMacs and other disasters


They say disasters never come singly. Whoever 'they' are and if you know who 'they' are, please can you give me their names and addresses so I can go round and complain.

All is not currently well at Hedges Towers. Four weeks and two days ago, as I was walking through St Albans to collect the grandchildren, my right ankle gave way suddenly, pitching me into the middle of the street. Not the first time it has done this, unreliable body-part that it is, but by far the most agonising.

Such was the pain coupled with the shock, that I just stayed where I ended up and howled. A car edged slowly round me without stopping. I howled some more. Finally, a nice young woman approached, asked if I was OK (clearly not) and suggested it might be a good idea if I got out of the road.

It appears from the subsequent X-ray that I have torn a ligament. Over a month on and I still can't see my ankle bone and there are interesting blue areas in unexpected places. Oh yes, I hear you chorus, now you'll have lots of time to write the next book. Lucky you, wish I could bust a ligament. Ah but you see, gentle reader, you are reckoning without the 'never coming singly' rule.

My beloved eMac has died. For the computer experts reading this: something has overheated/melted/ buggered/come unattached and I can't access the Hard Disc Drive. For the rest of you: 13k words of the next book are currently stuck inside a dead computer.

A frustrating evening has just been spent in the company of Brian the Super-Techie, a special cable and his reserve Apple Mac trying to access my files. We turned the computer on and off many times. We held down C keys, P keys and T keys. I said F rather a lot.

We ran a diagnostic CD: everything was OK apparently, just not OK enough to let me get at it. We watched an interesting video about taking an eMac apart to extract the HDD. There was a bit where the bloke on the video said : 'Uh-oh, you really want to be very careful if you do this, as it could all explode'  which was a tad worrying.

Trying-to-be-helpful people have said: 'Surely you could just re-write the first part of the book?' Or 'You could always carry on from where you got up to.' Oh, if it were only that easy!

 Last night I dreamed I was trying to remove the hard drive from my 2CV. Makes a change from Manderley, I suppose....



18 comments:

  1. Oh no, Carol. How awful. I have had a weak ankle all my life and an always falling over unless I'm holding onto a pushchair. All this practice over the years means I am really good at falling over without hurting myself very badly. I do hope you recover soon and as for the Mac, that must be incredibly upsetting. I'm a great believer in breaking 2 matches after one disaster.

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  2. Ever heard the word 'backup' ? Important things you'll ALWAYS backup and stock them away from your computer. Sounds easy to say that after the damage is done. But even I had to learn it the hard way

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    1. The interesting thing was, Mr H..that everything else is backed up, and I was just thinking: neeed to get the book backed up, when the comp died.

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  3. Oh Carol!!! Poor you! First, the ankle...I know only too well how painful that must have been. I spent much of my teens battling with a torn ligament that refused to heal. As for you e-Mac, ouch and ouch again. I am so very sorry. Again, I know how that feels. My mac laptop crashed a few years ago when I was writing my thesis. Enough said. I pray for you that you get the book back at least! ((( HUGS)))

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    1. It's so daft...I know it's only 13K words but I simply can't re-write it....

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    2. Like saying..you can always have another child exactly the same...you can't!

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  4. I feel your pain Carol. I got in a tizz when I lost a few paragraphs one day, dramatically announcing to an empty office that I could never rewrite what had been my best work to date. So I can't begin to imagine what this feels like. I really hope you get it back, and that your ankle gets better much quicker than it has been so far. Hugs.

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    1. Thanks Georgia! Bit of a heart-stopping time!

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  5. Oh, Carol, I feel as equally sorry as the above. 'Things' do, unfortunately, breaK in twos and threes.Hopefully, ALL will soon be healed/repaired. It's horrible when you lose work/suffer pain. Best wishes.

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    1. Thanks Joy..hopefully I can get my words back!

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  6. Oh no! What a disaster! Hope you manage to get it fixed and that your ankle gets better soon x

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  7. Ligaments are an absolute bugger - and Mac challenges are definitely and F-word!

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  8. I hate to agree, but 'they' are right. Crappy things always come in groups :( Hope you're ankle is healing and don't give up hope for retrieving your files. My computer died suddenly too (the week after my house was flooded, which was a week after I had bronchitis!) and I just kept at it until eventually, I got my files out. Fingers crossed for you :)

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  9. What a murder of accidents! So sorry to hear about that. Hope somehow something can be recovered from the hard disk - I had a similar problem with my laptop and somehow something got rescued... The ligament takes a long time to heal, but I hope it's not too painful - or at least not for long!

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    1. Thanks..the eMac is now in bits..HDD extracted and we're trying to rescue the mss....

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  10. Oh dear Carol. Have you tried Apple for help?

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