Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty

The thing that I never thought could happen on a mac happened. My hard drive crashed and burned! Basically, it started making this very scary whirring noise so I shut the computer down and then it didn't want to restart. After calling my dad and begging him to come pick me up and drive me to the apple store, I talked the apple "genius bar" guy who actually knew exactly what was wrong before I even finished telling him the symptoms but he was super nice and talked me through everything. He ran some tests and then broke the bad news that my hard drive was completely dead. He recommended not sending it to apple because he said that would cost me about $900. He told us how to get a new hard drive and install it ourselves. Apparently, the harddrives of laptops are all the same, you can get a generic "laptop" hard drive and use it in any computer you have. I also learned this is all my fault because I dropped my computer about a year ago and the damage I guess has been affecting the computer all this time. LUCKILY i backed up my entire hard drive at the end of February, so all my design work, documents, pictures, songs up to that point are saved, but I did lose everything that I have done in the last 4 weeks. It's not a whole lot of work, but it is some that I now get to recreate from scratch. My visual effects paper that was supposed to be due today was lost and I have to rewrite 8 pages...but it definitely could be worse. Sooo, long story short I bought a larger hard drive and now my computer is up and running but I still have to find the time to go back and install ALL my programs and move over my files. The lesson of this story is: back up your computer every day or you'll regret it.

I'm rushing to get all my homework out of the way before Wednesday because I'm going to New York to visit Jess and New Haven to visit Lexi this week!! Ahh! It's my first time taking a big trip by myself so I'm a little nervous and also very excited. Here are some things I hope to do there, but I'll update with pictures when I get back to see if I actually squeezed all these things in:

1) go see Avenue Q on Broadway
2) go to MOMA, museum of modern art
3) check out Central Park...I know it's super huge, so I'd probably only see a corner of it
4) have real New York pizza and go to a cafe that the beat writers hung out at in Greenwich Village
5) maybe check out one of those beautiful cathedrals in the city
6) see all the places Jess has been talking about forever: China Beer, Josies, etc. and meet all the NYU friends
7) go to Rice to Riches...a rice pudding place. I dont know why but I really want to go here
8) drive or walk through Times Square
9) buy a tshirt at Yale
10) make an appointment with the art department at Yale and tour (i've always been interested in it for grad school)

Let me know before Thursday if you know of any other places I must see that I'm forgetting