The excruciating details

I think I should include some background information because in that context what I did kind of sort of makes sense.

For a while, I've had a weird text input bug on Firefox, and an entirely different weird text input bug on Chrome. I suspect that it may be a problem related to insufficient memory, but I can't say for sure.

So, I thought, "If I'm going to be using my netbook as my main computer, I really need to do something about that text input bug, because it's really annoying."

So I decided to upgrade my version of Ubuntu.

My last upgrade went so smoothly that I didn't stop to think, "Do I have a bootable USB drive I can use if something goes wrong?" -- and though things had gone wrong before, I'd always had a backup computer to rely on.

At some point during the installation (I was asleep) something went wrong. I couldn't get it to boot up again, and I couldn't get it to boot up again in recovery mode.

I decided to do laundry.

I put 45 minutes of time on the dryer and went away. I came back and realized that my clothes weren't actually dry.

I tried another dryer, which also turned out not to be producing any heat.

I tried a third dryer, which finally started drying my clothes.

I went to a reception for a young writers contest at BPL. I dropped my plate on the floor while talking to a big-name writer.

I went to my sister's house. She put on home improvement shows while I worked on making a bootable USB drive.

Eventually everything turned out okay.

I think.

(I'm not sure whether I've managed to fix the problem with the wireless firmware. Right now I'm fairly tired and don't really care.)

I wonder whether I still have that text input bug.