bullshit covergence
Sometimes, a whole bunch of bullshit just happens all around the same time. Don't you just love it when that happens?
Remember Shobhit's car breaking down on the way down from Mount Spokane last Monday? He refilled the coolant after we stopped at O'Reilly Auto Parts in Spokane, and we made it home without incident. But! Shobhit took his car in for an oil change on Friday, and thereafter discovered apparently his radiator is leaking. He's going to take the car in for repair on Wednesday this week, but even though he did drive to work Friday, Saturday through Tuesday this week, he has been taking transit. I just pray all the people on all the buses he's been riding have been wearing masks; I have been avoiding public transit as much as possible for months now—something that pains me, as such a huge advocate for public transit otherwise. But a global pandemic really changes the rules on you for a while.
He just happens to have Wednesday this week off from both his jobs. I already have myself signed up to go to the office that morning to pick up my dual monitors from my desk. Shobhit's intention is to take his car in for repair after driving to my office to do that.
And on top of that? At 4:40 this afternoon, I have to take my iMac in to a nearby computer repair store, for which I'll have to pay a minimum of $79 just for diagnostics, to be deducted for whatever repair cost there is thereafter. I purchased my iMac in 2015 so any Apple Care coverage has long since expired. And I'll have to walk the thing down there carrying it in a tote bag, since we're not driving the car until it gets its own repair on Wednesday. Even though the car is actually parked in the garage right now, as he took the bus to work.
So let's back up a little on this whole story. I wanted to keep all my music files stored on the external hard drive in an attempt to free up memory space on the iMac itself, something another Apple Care person told me on the phone some months ago is something I need to do. I copied what music files were still on the computer hard drive to the external drive, and then deleted the copies still on the hard drive, on Saturday. When I then reopened the Apple Music app on my iMac yesterday morning . . . yet again—this also happened just after I transferred all my data from the old external hard drive to the new one just a few months ago—the Music app was completely empty: no tracks, no playlists. As ever, my primary concern is to get my playlists recovered and intact again.
I was on the phone with Apple Support yesterday afternoon for more than two and a half hours. I got transferred twice, so probably at least half that time, cumulatively, I was on hold. By the time I was on the phone with a third person, that guy had me go through the steps to recover from a Time Machine backup dated August 4.
Well, as of last night before I went to bed, the screen was stuck on the white apple logo reboot screen with the progress bar under it, which appeared to have reached its conclusion. I assumed it was still just part of the process, but the screen still looked that way this morning. The third guy yesterday actually set a callback time for 4:30 today just to follow up, but I decided to call Apple Support back this morning to see if it being stuck on that screen was normal . . . it was not. So this new guy had me try several ways of rebooting the computer to get it past that boot-up screen with the Apple logo, and nothing has worked. He declared it probably a hardware issue, and offered to make an appointment to take it in for repair.
Side note: it's not lost on me how privileged I really am with all of this, even with the frustrations added by the pandemic. As in, I would have far preferred an Apple Store appointment at University Village, but they are still not currently taking any such appointments. The Apple Store at Bellevue Square apparently is—but with no openings until Saturday! The guy on the phone looked up "Apple approved" third party places I could go, and this GoEBITS place down at Harvard Market was the best option. Thankfully that place is all of seven blocks away so I can walk there pretty easily. Diagnostics alone will take 2-3 days. But, back to how lucky and privileged I still am: I have not one, but several other devices I can still use for day to day computer-use needs. Not only does Shobhit have his laptop (which he had to rebuy new just a couple months ago himself), but I also happen to have my work laptop at home with me as well. And then of course I also have both my iPad and my iPhone. So I won't exactly be hurting for computer use. I just have to put certain projects on hold, such as digitizing my old videotapes, which I did a fair amount of work on over the weekend.
I think I may be without my regular desktop computer for the better part of a week, though. And this fucking five-year-old computer has given me nothing but trouble since I was forced to upgrade it to the 64-bit Catalina macOS. I'm starting to get the feeling things won't be great again until I have purchased an entirely new computer again myself. I just don't want to have to spend that kind of money again just yet. We'll see how much that kind of spending compares to getting this computer repaired.
What a colossal pain in the ass all this shit has been.
As for the rest of the weekend, it has been otherwise pretty low key, although I did do a fair amount of walking. I did my first real walk-to-shopping trip to the new Central District PCC, where I had several things on a shopping list but I walked there and back. I brought two tote bags but I only bought about 10 items and they all fit in just one bag. The store is 0.7 miles away so it's just a roughly twelve-minute walk each way. I did that on Saturday and it was really the only time I ventured out of the condo.
Yesterday Alexia walked with me to the PCC office and back, and since I rode my bike to do it on Tuesday this week and she was looking after the cats while we were traveling to Idaho over the past weekend, it was the first time we had taken this walk together in a while—since the previous weekend, and that time we went on Friday, July 24. So we hadn't walked together in 17 days. We had a lot to catch up on and a lot to talk about. It was quite pleasant as always.
I did take a couple minutes extra in the office, to clear some clutter away from my monitors, to make it easier for IT—probably Andrew, a cool guy I like a lot—to dismount them for me to bring home Wednesday morning. Then on the way back we stopped briefly at Target so I could finally get the hand soap refill I needed as well as just a few other things, and then we walked the rest of the way back to our building. We made a plan for our walk next weekend to include a ride on the Seattle Great Wheel, which has been reopened for business since the end of June. We'll have to wear masks which will make some of the photos odd but that's okay; I'm looking forward to getting the first view and photos from that vantage point of where the Alaskan Way Viaduct used to be. I've ridden the Great Wheel eight times already before but haven't done so since January 2016; that was with both Shobhit and Laney and Laney really freaked out. Both of them are afraid of heights, and neither Alexia or I are. Alexia has never been on it and is eager to experience it.
Beyond all that, I've just watched a bit of movies and TV. Last night Shobhit and I watched the first couple of episodes of the new HBO version of Perry Mason, which has me intrigued enough to keep watching, although I take slight issue with how unrealistic it is to have a popular megachurch headed by a woman in the early thirties, even in Los Angeles. That element I'm having a hard time getting past, but, whatever.
[posted 12:20 pm]