The sudden and unexpected death of my computer this weekend was, knock on wood, the last insult added to an injury-filled 2008. Late Friday the computer froze up just like in the old days, and I thought nothing of it, restarting to continue developing my new website. Only she never came back up. Ever. The weak sound of the fan and dim, dim light on the front of my iMac G5 (made before you got those fancy iMac G5’s with the built-in iSight) was the only sign of life, like the weak breath and low pulse of a coma patient. The logic board had died, and I was 6 months out of my AppleCare extended warranty, which had served me well in the past. The cost of replacing the logic board, similar in nature to giving our imaginary coma patient a new brain, was said to be $1,100.00, which, despite rumors, I do not have laying around in a pile on my bed.

So the plan — if you could call it that — is to cobble together that amount of scratch and buy a new computer. My iMac was only 3 1/2 years old, too soon by my standards, but it had shown signs of a weak constitution before. The detriment to my freewheeling freelance lifestyle has yet to be fully appreciated, but I’ll wager it’s somewhere in the ‘mildly catastrophic’ area. For now I have begun to migrate to my wife’s computer, an older, slower eMac with less than 1/3 the hard drive and an out-of-date OS that won’t let me install Dreamweaver.

2009 might start off with a pretty tough January, but despite everything I have nothing but hope for a better year ahead.