Hissy Fit

Yesterday I lent my laptop to one of my housemates, as I often do. Came home, it was on my bed in its well-fitting zip-around flip-open bag. Picked it up, laptop flies out and lands on my foot, then onto floor. For not only was the bag not zipped up, but the handy velcro straps that hold the expensive piece of technology in place hadn't been done up either. Ouch to foot. Double-ouch to fact that when I started laptop the screen was all strange, with various coloured stripes on it and not much else. Hmm. Hooked it up to external monitor to see if it was just the screen that was buggered. Umm, no. Microsoft symbol comes up, with some interesting lines of gobbledygook text, then it just goes blank. Doesn't even make it to sign-on. Yes, I did curse, yes, I did scream blasphemies about living with a bunch of animals who were raised in a barn and had no respect for property or any idea how to look after it, yes, I did threaten to start packing that second and give them notice and just get the hell out of there before anything else of mine was stolen or destroyed. It still makes me sick to think of it, even though I know full well it was an accident and that said housemate is one of the best I have ever had etc etc. Really... why? What lesson am I meant to learn from THAT? After having my study-art-work-play plans foiled by the Dead Cat Incident on Friday, I was actually in a really creative mood, had just been to see Y do a great piece at an exhibition opening and my hayfever had finally cleared to the point where I could almost think (after a week of major head-fuzzy ouchiness) and all I wanted was to sit in front of the telly watching the Bill and sending emails and looking for tattoo designs and digging through the net researching galleries to visit and museums to haunt and then... Nope. Sorry Zoo, no laptop for you. Grr. One would be tempted to think that one should be more selfish, not lend things to people or turn up every time something needs to be buried or someone needs company for a gruesome hospital trip. THIS IS WHAT I GET FOR MY TROUBLE? Stomp feet, pout, rant.

But hey, maybe it won't be too expensive to fix (and housemate has offered to pay for it). Don't reckon the harddrive is totally knackered, so should be able to retrieve all of my data. Can do most of the stuff at Uni, 'cept for downloading pix. Worse things could happen. At least I'm not the cat.