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October 12, 2021:

NO MORE DAYS FROM HELL – ONLY HEAVENLY DAYS

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much frustrated, irritated, and disgusted fish, ready to kick the bejeezus out of Mercury and its damn retrograde, which I don’t know I’ll survive. And I’m writing these here notes on my laptop computer, which is a pain in the ASS. And why am I doing so? Because the desktop computer is so screwed up right now that it is sitting there like so much fish, frozen in time whilst trying to install Big Sur. The saga of this is one I must keep short or I will literally smash the damn thing to smithereens. It began when I bought a new external CD/DVD drive, came home, ripped the old one to shreds so I could get my CD, and then plugged in the new one and put a different CD in it. And it did nothing. And it would not eject. Well, it became instantly clear that it wasn’t the drive at all but something in the computer or iTunes that wasn’t “seeing” it. Which means I wasted money buying it because there was nothing wrong with the other one. So, I called Apple Support. We screen shared and she found it under devices, but not under iTunes, which is why it’s not being recognized. She posited that because iTunes is no more it simply has stopped functioning properly. She suggested, as have others, that I upgrade to Big Sur. She assured me it was simple and everything would be just as it was, desktop-wise. And so, I clicked on upgrade. It seemed to load it fine and I got the installer icon, which was not responding. I quit and relaunched it and it still wouldn’t work. We trashed it and went to the App Store and tried from there. Same thing. At this point, I was getting very nervous.  So, she had me restart in some mode and she did a “first aid” just in case there was anything wrong in the hard drive. It did it twice and that meant it had fixed any errors. Then she had me restart again, this time in recovery mode. After some trial and error we found the Big Sur upgrade and began it. It said it would take an hour, but it seemed to actually be moving at a decent clip. She scheduled a call back for six o’clock to make sure it had all gone fine.

Meantime, I was hungry, so I did a quick trip to Taco Bell, got food, and came home and ate it. At some point, the computer restarted, so I thought that meant it would now install Big Sur. It said twenty-nine minutes and was moving along. After a while, it restarted again, doing the same thing but this time it kept going. It got all the way to the end of the task bar, with only about an eighth of an inch to go. I still had twenty minutes before the call back, so I was sure it would be done by then and we could make sure all was well. Only it didn’t budge. At this point, I was not only nervous, I was beginning to panic. The call back happened at six-fifteen and it still hadn’t completed. The person on the phone was at a loss and got me a senior tech. I brought him up to speed and by that time the task bar had been sitting where it was sitting for forty minutes. Not good. So, he had me shut off the computer and unplug it and then plug it back in. The we went into “safe” mode and because we couldn’t screen share he had me do screen share on my phone and use the camera to show him the computer screen. And this is where it got really scary. Somehow, after some back and forth, it loaded Big Sur. But it began asking me all these questions as if we were setting up a computer for the first time. We skipped the back up from a back-up device because it’s supposed to do that automatically. Every question took forever to answer because in “safe” mode everything is slow as molasses. Then we finally got to a screen that was asking me to name the computer and create a password. Well, that wasn’t right and he got nervous and had me shut down again. We restarted, went back to “recovery” mode and tried to restore from my back-up Time Capsule. Only it said it couldn’t find it. Well, it’s hard-wired into the computer, which I showed him and so that was odd. Then he had me do the whole Big Sur upgrade again and he said I’d be his priority case in the morning and he’d call at eleven – the hope being that it would complete successfully. But it did the same thing – it got to an eighth of an inch before finishing and just sat there. It’s been sitting there now for two-and-a-half hours. I’m not touching it. I told him he had to get me back to the old OS, Mojave, so I had my desktop back. And I know he felt very bad about it all. The only thing that is keeping me from completely going off the damn deep end right now is knowing there’s an afternoon back up on the Time Capsule (at least, that’s the hope) and that even if there was some horrible issue, when he checked system preferences just before we tried again, there was still 500 gigs of stuff, which is everything on the computer. I also know that even when computer hard drives die, there are people who can retrieve everything. If he can’t fix it, then he’ll make an appointment for me at the Apple Store and I’ll have to lug it in. My only other option, since it’s way out of the Apple Care warranty, is to take it to this Mac Store fix-it place in Burbank – they’re apparently very good at this stuff. I don’t want to bring the Time Capsule in because it’s my router and I need the wi-fi to write these here notes and get on the Internet. But if I have to, I think the fellow in the back house will let me use his, presuming it will work at that distance. And that, dear readers, is the sorry state of affairs right now and I truly have had it and have reached rope’s end.

I did watch a motion picture to distract me, but I just don’t have the energy to write about it, so I’ll do that in tomorrow’s notes, if the end of the rope hasn’t done me in. I gotta tell you.

Yesterday, as you might have surmised, was a turd of a day. I got seven hours of sleep, answered e-mails, did stuff on the computer and then went to the Apple Store, picked up a package at the mail place, and then came home to find the issue with the drive. I did a Zoom with David and we got everything set up in Office 365 so that we could both work on our script document. Whether that will still work once we get everything sorted out is not known to me, but it’s stored in HIS Office cloud so it’s easy to set it up again if we must. And then began the horror show, which lasted into the evening.

Today, please send some strong excellent vibes and xylophones for all this stuff to get worked out successfully – we need ‘em. I’ll be up by ten-thirty and hopefully the Apple guy will call me as promised at eleven. At noon, I have a meeting – it was supposed to be a lunch meeting, but I think we’ll just do it here, as I have a dinner thing later that I can’t get out of. The meeting will probably last an hour and then if I have to end up taking the computer somewhere I’ll have time to do so. Then I have the dinner thing, and then I can watch, listen, and relax. I’m just hoping everything is fixed by then, seriously.

Tomorrow, I have a rehearsal with the singer, and then it’s more of the same.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, hope that everything gets worked out successfully, I must have a meeting, I’ll hopefully pick up packages, I’ll have a dinner thing, and then I’ll watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite films of Harrison Ford? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, tired of having these recent days from HELL and perhaps it’s time for some heavenly days..

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