On the depressing day of the 2004 US election, my laptop hard disk was loose. Subsequent tinkering with it did nothing. The election apparently not going my way, I decided to go to Apple Ginza to have my laptop examined and was informed that I had lost the disk; completely lost it. Thank goodness it was still under warranty. It just happened that a few days before, the external hard disk that acted as a back-up system was experiencing problems too. Somehow, these two incidents paled to the news of the election; I was surprised to find myself at peace with losing the 70GB of stuff from that laptop and risking losing 160GB of data from the external hard disk… Needless to say, I will be without a laptop, and that NaNoBlogMo and NaNoWriMo will have to wait till my laptop comes back as I am typing this on a borrowed computer.