I seemed to gain three pounds in a day - I guess that means Thanksgiving was a success, right?

aw, man ... that sucks. Hope you can recover them.

Hope you've got good news on the laptop front today!

After about two hours with the personal computing service center, we established that the problem is most likely hard-drive related, i.e. it doesn't appear to be there.. or at least not that the programs can find. This is, distressingly enough, what did in my last iMac; something fried and it just couldn't find the hard disk. I'm sending it off to Apple where they will attempt to diagnose and repair the problem; since it's under warranty I should get a working computer back free of charge at some point in the future, but the likelihood of that computer including the original contents of my hard drive when it comes back to me is probably going to be slim. The upshot is that I did apparently think to put one of my papers on my storage webspace, meaning I'm only out 14 pages of Japanese military policy, not 33 pages of Xinjiang Uyghurs and Japanese military policy together. The Chinese danwei work unit paper is now about half finished, so there is a possibility -- however remote -- that I may turn this around into some kind of last-minute hail-mary come-from-behind save... unfortunately, doing so requires me to rewrite from scratch my Japan paper (and I don't know about anyone else, but trying to recreate lost work is one of the most difficult things for me to do; the constant nagging sense that I've already put these thoughts down on the page, probably in a better phrasing, the first time around, makes for a major writing block) within the next two weeks while simultaneously finishing up all the others, or in other words working on all three at once just like I was trying to avoid by starting a month or so in advance. As may be, we can probably expect extremely light-to-nonexistent blogging on my part until December 13th (last day of classes and the deadline for the final paper) at the earliest, first because I have to rely on the university computer labs for my internet access and second because I should actually be using that time to be writing papers like a madman.

Phew.

Wish me luck and I'll let y'all know if I survive this at some point in the ominously near future, and always, always, ALWAYS think to make backups of your drafts,

-- MC²