Small steps forward

Amazon refunded the erroneous shipping charge. Chapters, after some prodding and possibly attempted blame-shifting, made up for their error by balancing out the cancelled gift card shipping charge with a $10 gift certificate, which was nice of them, although it does require me to buy more merchandise from them in the future, but nothing I wasn't going to do anyway.

Picked up a stack of books in languages I don't really read over at the library booksale this weekend. I was a little short on cash when I paid for mine and I was going to walk over to the nearest bank machine to get some more, but the lady who was handling the sales said that she'd accept whatever I had in my wallet, which was very kind and generous of her.

So, a few things to definitely give thanks for this week.

One more ambiguous is the iMac situation. It seems to be in the process of eating another hard drive. I couldn't get it to boot at all from internal last weekend and earlier this week. Got it to boot from external, which is a relief, since hard drives are simpler to replace than logic boards, and then when I applied an update to the external boot drive and rebooted, the internal drive finally came back up.

We're plannning to remove the internal drive and stick it into a Firewire enclosure and just go boot from there once we can get one on sale. My dad thinks that it's overheating inside the iMac, hence the intermittent failures. I think there might be a loose connection somewhere exacerbated by the heat. In any case, I'm just glad it's an easily replaceable part and hopefully external booting will prove more reliable.

Thanksgiving

Well, today is Thanksgiving, and replete with turkey and eggnog, I feel I should give thanks for something.

Only, I'm not sure what, as just over the past few days, I've discovered that Chapters just charged and shipped me an order I'd cancelled less than five minutes after placing it, and Amazon charged me shipping fees for a free shipping order, while cancelling two more items I've waited several months for.

And that's not even mentioning the other stuff that happened this year.

So, I guess I give thanks that things weren't worse.

And I'll make my usual corollary that just because things could be worse doesn't mean they're not bad enough already.

And I give thanks for the good things which happened, whatever they were.