169 - Argh!

I'm at work so I have to make this quick... no editing...

So yesterday I stayed home because around 8 pm on Sunday I began smelling something I can only describe as a hot electrical smell, or a plastic-y smell coming through my airvents. Well... first I didn't know where it was coming from, but eventually I realized it whatever it was, was being circulated by the vent system. I didn't know what was happening but I wasn't liking it.

Went to bed, woke up around 3 am and the smell had gotten worse. Figured that since it got colder as the night progressed, the heater was kicking on more frequently, and the smell had built up. I got out of bed, turned the heater off, cracked some windows to air out the house (figured it wasn't good to be breathing it), turned the fan on low, and snuggled deep under the covers. Was really cold when I woke up... Dad said it was 22 at 6 am when he left for work... we live 8 mins apart so I figure it was 22 at my house as well.

Called in, said I needed to figure out what was going on, if something was burning, I wanted to stay home in case I needed to grab the cats and some papers and get out of the house. Called the A/C guys, they said they would be at my house between 1 pm and 5 pm. I turned the heater on to warm things up and the smell returned, but it was less than before.

Long story short, it was a wire nut, melting where the high voltage wire came into the unit. I guess if you don't screw them on tight enough, or if they are somehow defective, that kind of thing can happen... So my house could have burned down. Good times.

Also thought the smoke alarm closest to my bedroom had stopped fuctioning (checked it before I went to bed because it seemed like the wise thing to do). Turns out I needed to push harder and at a certain angle to get the test beeper to shrilly beep at me. But it didn't beep before I went to bed, so I slept lightly.

While all that was going on, yesterday morning I tried to get on my computer, and it wouldn't boot up (that's why there was no blog yesterday). It keeps telling me that it can't find Windows. I've tried using the recovery tool but it isn't working, I've tried every combination of data restore, tools, systems check and such that I can come up with, says there's nothing wrong with my hard drive, I just can't boot up. So when I get home tonight I'm probably going to have to restore the C drive to its factory settings and lose anything I hadn't saved to my external hard drive.

I admit, I felt lost without my computer. I'm used to having a question and being able to go online to answer it. I'm used to blogging and emailing and such. I'm really unhappy about potentially losing the budget I've worked on, especially since my checkbook register is part of it... that means I'll have to slog through months of bank statements to re-create it again. Most everything else is safe. Not sure if the latest version of my book is on the external hard drive, but all the old iterations up to the point where I began submitting queries, is. Sometime in August I cleaned off my laptop and moved a bunch of stuff to the external HD. The new story I started though... is gone. Idiot me bought an 8 GB thumbdrive on Black Friday specifically to store a copy of my budget and my writing and anything else I might want a second copy of, but I never did anything with it.

Gonna make a call to Sony this afternoon to see if there's anything else I can do, but I fear I'm going to have to start over. Can't help but wonder if Your Shape has anything to do with it. Things were working fine until I loaded that, and then I had problem after problem. Wonder if I can somehow get that off?