Electronics Hospital

So... I'm not exactly sure what happened to electronics at my house the past couple of days, but it's apparently the season for all of them to die without reason.

It started with my phone. I accidentally splashed some water on it, wiped it up, and didn't really think twice about it. A few hours later I looked down and my screen was dead. Like, it'd light up, but I couldn't see anything. There was no text on the screen. I tried turning it off and back on... nothing. I whined a bit to BJ and Jess, then moved on with life and kind of forgot about it. A few hours later I noticed that the time was back on the outside screen, but it looked like a VHS with poor traction. It was staticky and the time was split on the different sides. Weird... but getting better! Another hour or two later I looked at it again and it was all better! Huzzay!

Later that evening I decided to make dinner and keep myself entertained by listening to Harry Potter. I have it all on my work laptop (no more room on my mac!) so I plugged that into the stereo and was listening while I cooked when it suddenly stopped. Confused, I went over and opened it (it doesn't turn off when you shut the top) and it started playing again. K, weird. But whatever. Then it turned off again. I decided I might be taxing it too hard, so I started closing everything else, but half of them wouldn't close. I gave up and went back to dinner. Later I asked BJ to try restarting it. He chose restart, all the programs closed, and you know how for a few seconds, you only see the wallpaper? Well, it froze there. Even better? Harry Potter started playing! K... weird. Really, really weird. So BJ forced it to shut down, then turned it back on. 2 hours later, I had finally typed in my password, and it still hadn't finished turning on. So I forced it to shut down and tried again. It got to the login screen a lot faster this time, but still went super slow opening Windows. 2-3 hours after I tried restarting it again, it finally opened to the Windows screen. By then I was ready for bed, so I closed it and waited till morning.

Morning came, and there was an error message that we couldn't get to go away. I started whining to Michael about it, and he offered to help, but wanted to know what kind of harddrive I had. It took awhile to get the start window open, then click Control Panel. Then BJ and I went on a walk (it really helps my mood to walk in the mornings and truly enjoy Spring) and came back to find that the Control Panel had finally opened. Michael finally gave up waiting on me trying to finish the instructions and just came over.

Since I had nothing to do work-wise (there was some stuff I was doing online, but I had to keep getting help from others' so I had to wait until they returned my calls), I went out and trimmed the rosebushes. Then I made pot pie for lunch and fed Michael in exchange for working on my computer. Then I just did various other projects I had been wanting to do. It was great.

Michael ran diagnostics on my laptop and found that part of the harddrive was corrupted. He repaired it, ran the diagnostics again, and it was fine. So we rebooted... and it still took hours. He then let me borrow a case to put my harddrive on so that I can use it as an external harddrive on another computer and get all of my files off before the harddrive fails. And then I get the joy of working with the Helpless Desk to get my laptop all better. [sigh] This doesn't sound like it's gonna be all that fun.

Despite all this, I still had a great day. I ended up making banana bread as well, and we went to our Elders Quorum game night and got free pizza. I was in a great mood. We got back and BJ plopped down on the couch and we heard a loud noise. Investigating, we discovered the cause. My phone had been close to dying, but I needed to keep it close in case people called for work, so I had plugged it in next to the couch and let my phone charge there. Well, it didn't fully charge, but I kept using it, so I left the charger there so I could charge it in between uses. The cord was draped onto the couch, and when BJ plopped down, he sat on the cord which, in turn, yanked the plug out of the wall, pulling the cord out of the plug! So now my phone is almost dead and I have no phone charger. So if you try to call me and it goes straight to voicemail, that's probably why. Sorry!

I'm scared to think what's gonna happen next...