Pulling an all-nighter

How badly can one screw up his or her personal computer?
I'd say the answer is: pretty damned badly :-)

Seeing as my old mut was getting slower and slower in every single thing it did, I decided to call in the help of a professional.
Luckily he happens to be a friend of mine. Which means more fun during the process and less of a financial bleeding for yours truly. Don't worry, I'm not a cold-blooded leech. The plan is that I help him decorate his new pad. Also a potentially quite time-consuming favour, but soooo much fun!

So, at about 18:30 he arrived. My mom and I stuffed him full of Chinese food and other gooddies. Wouldn't want our 'savior' to suffer from fatigue or dissatisfaction. After dinner & talk we - well, he, with me watching :-) - started tackling the problem.
It took about seven hours, a load of patience, coke (the liquid bubbly kind) and security software to get my dad's laptop issues out of the way and clean up my cyber-mess.

Well, it would have been spick 'n span by now if my dear old desktop hadn't decided to spontaniously reboot in the middle of the scan. This ment that we - still meaning him with me watching and nodding guiltily - could merrily start all over again.

At least now the hardest part is over... I think. My pc is now out of the intensive care unit and in the survey room.
So wish I understood the whole bits and bytes story more than I do. All I have is a very basic tiny glimpse of an idea of how it all functions. And that's always fun when your newest friend group contains mostly engineers and such. Never felt so ignorant in my life :-) Am so happy that they're the kind of people that realizes others can have capacities in different fields even though they're completely oblivious in their field of expertise.

At about three this morning, having already stolen as many hours of his day off and feeling pretty guilty and kinda sleepy at the same time, I waved him goodbye as he departed into the night, guided by his handy guide, 'Tom Tom'. And now here I am, 'fresh as a daisy' (haha) - at a quarter to eleven, having slept only six hours... We're making progress, yesterday it was five and a half! And about to leave for a visit to my family at the Belgian sea shore.

It's strange what we put our bodies up to in the holidays. Isn't sleeping enough part of the whole 'relaxing' thing? We assume that it's normal to stay up late and that we'll have plenty of time to catch up on our snore-time. I once heard that it isn't actually possible to 'catch up' on sleep. You can sleep longer later on, but it's not really making up for anything.

New resolution: returning to the path I have long walked, meaning sleeping enough, on reasonable hours and so on. I mean, hey, the first of September school's starting again for me. I better make sure I'm back in the rythm by then.