Oh what a night... or week rather.

This has been a hectic week. I was using my wonderful macbook on Monday night and it froze (which is odd, because that has never happened before). So like a logical person, I tried the force quit command and when that didn't work I manually shut it down. When it came back on, it was a blank screen with a folder with a question mark in the center. Oh no, I thought, what happened to my computer? I shut it down and turned it on again and the same thing happened. Great.. just what I need. I borrowed Ana's computer and googled it and it turns out that my hard drive (or disque dur) died. It just crashed. Apparently it is a fairly common problem for macbooks bought during the time I bought mine (August 06) so if you have one too you might want to back up everything, because I sure didn't. So after asking a French girl for some technical words, I went to the Apple Authorized Reseller of Grenoble and I tried to explain my problem (in very broken French) and he tried to explain what it was (in very broken English). And it is covered under warranty, but if I want them to try and recover my documents and such, it is 70 euros an hour (roughly $110). But, it has all my school work for the past two years on it, and all my projects I've been working on all semester here (one is due Friday, and I have to start all over..) not to mention the hundreds of pictures from France/Ireland/Spain. So I've got my fingers crossed that they'll be able to recover some things... meanwhile, I have to wait until Wednesday when he's supposed to call and let me know the status. Hopefully I'll get it back, but it sounds like they're going to ship it to the US to get it fixed, or at least get the parts from there. So I am without my own computer until then. Luckily, one of my roommates is on spring break this week and he has a macbook too and he left his computer with me to use to work on my project for the week.. and he doesn't get back until after the project is due, so I'm really grateful for that. I'm just hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. Looks like I've now got hours and hours of work to do on papers and projects for the rest of the semester since I'll more than likely be starting from scratch... and on a side note, if I want to get my old hard drive back I have to buy it from them, and it would be at least 90 euros, and if you take it to a professional place to recover it in the US, it will be anywhere for $500 upwards (according to Apple Technical Support). So I think if I've lost everything, thats the end and I'll just have to steal pictures from everyone else. Sucks, but I don't want to spend $500 + trying to recover pictures when I could go back to both places for less than that... So that's been my week. And its been rainy and cold and they're doing construction on our street so I've been up early every morning. Oh well, c'est la vie. (That's life). I'll keep y'all posted on any new Mac issues. But the moral of the story: Back up your hard drive. You can get an external hard drive for less than $100 and then you won't have to worry about paying someone way more than that per hour to *try* to recover it.