Okay, so the phone seems to be on the level, but there must be some sort of technical difficulty equilibrium, because now the main hard drive is acting up again on my desktop. At one point today, it seemed to be okay, and at that precise moment I dug my car out from the snow and the "check engine" light came on after taking a couple of tries to start, something that's never happened with this car before.

I've figured out a little ritual that seems to get the machine booted up again, but I couldn't keep it running long enough to back up the disk. Eventually I got it to shut down, and I'm hoping that a little bit of rest will do it good. I think I had it shut down while I was gone last weekend, immediately after the last time it did this, and it lasted a full week before crapping out again. I may leave it dormant until Monday, at which point I'll at least back it up and hopefully clone it and swap it out entirely without any ill effects to the system. He says hopefully.