I am sorry to report that soon after the burglary, the Apple G4 Powerbook failed to power up one afternoon, leaving me with two lost computers in one week. At first I was in denial, thinking that I would somehow be able to get the Apple repaired, and in fact about twenty times I went back and tried to turn it on again, in hopes that it would have changed its mind and come back to life in that mysterious way computers have sometimes but no. It was a deadster. 

I went to our local computer shop and the guy there said “we don’t fix Apples.” He said he knew a guy who might, up in Oklahoma City, but I didn’t think that sounded too great. I knew only too well that the repair could easily cost more than a new (used) G4.

This threw me into a quandry. I doubted that I could afford another Apple. But I didn’t want anything else. I asked Pete Wann at Cowtown Chronicles about local Apple repair places, but all he could say was Fort Worth Camera and a place in Arlington — there was, apparently, no super-cool back-alley shop where the Apple users could get broken laptops fixed.

I took it out of my briefcase this morning. I looked at it. My husband believes that anything that isn’t printed on paper is likely to be destroyed, not preserved for posterity, and he appears to be right about the (not too many but still) documents on the Apple, plus a couple of hundred photos and a monster movie the kids filmed using a digital camera last summer.

I’m not tossing it yet. I still have in mind to try to send it to a friend in Minnesota, who might look at it and could possibly get the documents off. But overall, I feel these days that the only place I can safely leave anything is on my website or my yahoo email account, or on paper. Hopefully, GoDaddy has got their servers backed up and their emergency plans laid, because I am trusting them.