  My computer is fixed. I didn't have to spend $500 for a new hard drive and the labor to install it. I didn't have to wait two weeks to get it done. (In fact the fixing was free -- except for 2 hours of waiting and $20 in cab fare.
) Everything seems to be working OK. The bad news: I lost everything on my hard drive. 5,000 songs I meticulously downloaded and categorized from my own CDs. Songs I did the same thing with from borrowed CDs. Songs I paid to download from the iTunes store. Emails I was saving. Email addresses. Pictures of vacations, visits with the kids and fun parties.
Pictures of ... um ... other things. Movie clips. Bookmarks. "Borrowed" software. All gone. The not-so-bad news: I did back up most of my hard drive in October. So I have older pictures. Resumes. Old Christmas letters. My Christmas address book. The beginnings of that book that will make me rich some day. So all is not lost. But the little drama fest is over. I can check email from home again. I realized I could survive for entire days without trolling the Internet for everything from late-breaking news to blog updates to pictures of naked guys.
And this spirit of purging has extended to other piles of crap cluttering up my physical world. I also vacuumed up a 20 lb. dust bunny that had been hiding under my iMac. And I now have completely up-to-date versions of most basic software. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Just as soon as I check bigmuscle one more time. 
