It's Always Sumthin

I'm accessing the innertubes from my laptop this morning because my desktop apparently couldn't stand (at least) three consecutive ungraceful shut-downs.  I didn't mention this but the ENTIRE town of Portales was without power for most of yesterday morning.  I know this because we had three... count 'em, THREE... short-duration power outages around 0600 yesterday, during which I dutifully reset what needed resetting and returned to my warm and cozy bed, arising for good around 1030 hrs.

At which time I booted up the peesee and discovered I had no internet.  A quick call to Yucca Telecom confirmed that yes, the entire town has no internet, as the entire town has been without power all morning.  Well, OK then.

Things got back to normal about a half hour later and I didn't give this much thought afterward, coz Stuff Happens.

Fast forward to this morning... approximately 0600 hrs.  The power goes off again.  And again.  And AGAIN...three more outages that last about a minute each, in quick succession.  After the third bump my peesee refused to boot, even in safe mode -- all I get is the dreaded Blue Screen o' Death.

So we pulled out the laptop, fired it up, downloaded 46 Very Important Windows Updates (150 Mb worth), installed same; and 60.78 Mb of Norton updates and installed same.  All while metaphorically holding our breath as the Windows update installation proceeded, due to the friendly "Installing updates -- Do NOT Turn Off Your Computer!" messages.  All this shit took at LEAST two hours.

So we have the day's activities mapped out for us, which will include trying to breathe life back into our desktop.  Thank The Deity At Hand that I run full back-ups three times a week, the most recent of which was Sunday night.  We won't lose much if it comes down to re-installing Windows.

Update, 1050 hrs:  The desktop is back up and it's the strangest thing.  The box wouldn't boot in "repair" mode (I got an immediate BSoD) but booted up fine in "normal" mode.  Who knows what evil lurks in the heart o' Redmond?  Not me... but I AM grateful to be back up and running.