Earlier last week, I noticed a spider web on the driver-side mirror and thought nothing of it. Every day, I’d drive the sixty-four miles from to work and back, and this tough little monkey still manages to hang on for dear life subsisting on the odd gnat that floats by my car. When not out weaving the web or partaking of other arthropods, the spider hides behind the mirror which one would think since the housing is black it would be scorching hot for the little arachnid.

I do not try to mess with the spider or take down the web since in many Asian cultures consider spiders as good luck. My sense of communion and affection for the spider was put to the test when I had my car cleaned in preparation for my road trip. A byzantine process of multi-stage washes then meticulous drying stages orchestrated by a dozen, if not more people, would prove to be nothing to my spider. The side-mirrors do get a good douching and dried with compressed air. Thinking that my eight-legged talisman was lost forever, I felt that my luck had run dry.

Here in Chicago, weeks after seeing the first spider web, tootling down a four-lane expressway… the spider comes out! Sensing that the wind was too strong, it crawled back into the mirror’s housing. I can feel my luck coming back to me.

My purse no longer contains a sleek black laptop. I write this as I grudgingly stare at my PowerBook. Earlier today, while chatting inside my Parallels instance, my Macbook stopped responding, save for the mouse, and I heard some scratching going on below my right hand. No, this wasn’t the normal geiger-counter sound of a healthy hard disk, this was the click of death. A long scratching sound followed by a clicking made my heart sink. Much like my backup drive failing before, I knew I was doomed… but this time… it was much worse.

I quickly left work and picked up a firewire drive. I was able to boot my Macbook and grab my entire home directory, approximatgely 22GB. Happily, that part of the drive was still accessible. With data safely stored, I ran a Disk Utility, and three hours of node errors and the dreaded scratch and click… it was high time that I headed on over to the Apple Store. The Apple concierge service, said that the Somerset store was experiencing high customer volumes, so I was unable to get an appointment to see a “Genius”. I took the chance and drove on over to see if I could just drop my Macbook off to be diagnosed in the morning. After waiting patiently for scores of minor iPod issues and a guy with a dirty keyboard, I was able to get get a hold of a “Genius” ten minutes before the store closed. The first lines of dialogue with the “Genius” keyed him in that I wasn’t just another vapid computer user, and we were able to quickly come to the conclusion that the drive needed to be replaced. The repair is quick (it’s just a few screws) but I was told three to five business days to get the part in. For now… I’m back to lugging around my PowerBook.

My parents are hitting their stride before retiring. So here’s my inheritance, going down the drain.