I woke up early to transplant Tigereye's hard drive into the spare identical laptop case from figment0. (I'm not yet secure enough in my geek to transplant a hard drive into a different laptop case when I don't know what drivers it needs or anything.) There was much cussing as I discovered that the screw holding the hard drive in was impossible to unscrew. I unscrewed a lot of other things, but that didn't work to pry the hard drive free. (There was no actual prying per se, just conceptual.)

Finally, by dint of the sort of focus that martial artists and practitioners of magic need to have, I managed to ease the screw loose, bit by bit. Turned out that some asshat had secured it with a dab of some form of screw glue. I cussed up a storm and put the hard drive in the clone body.

I did not plug the thing into wall current, thinking (probably wisely) that I should try it just on battery power lest something be wrong. (In retrospect, I should have tried it first with battery without HD, then with.) There was a massive failure to boot. I growled, glowered, and began the (much easier) process of putting everything back where I found it. V called just as I was finishing up screwing, and I told her the bad news.

She came over to pick the thing up and to get a few more things done while I was still around. It was finally time to go. I unplugged my spare green cat-5 cable from her new NIC, and something about the end of it caught my eye. "Hey, this thing has holes in it!" I discovered.

I looked closer. Yep, dozens of tiny little puncture marks. The sort not made by any machine. I started laughing and showed it to V.

"Looks like you've got about four cats left on that thing," she told me.

If eris_raven and I were still living together, that impertinent little fluff would get a severe glaring-at, and perhaps a bath. (shammash categorically does not chew cords or step on keyboards, because of bellow-induced trauma when he tried this as a kitten. Miss Raven was never so trained.)