Regardless of what happened in Vegas, what happened at home while we were in Vegas was: a power failure. The report was that once it came back on, the iMac wouldn’t finish booting. So, when we arrived home, there it sat, a blank gray screen glaring back at me.

“Probably just needs to be shut down and restarted,” I thought. And I was right, sort of. This time, it completed its boot up, but it wasn’t long before:

The spinning beach ball of death. Ever since then, it will randomly and annoyingly freeze and spin until I force quit out of the application. It seems to only affect one or another application in memory at a time with others unaffected. Also, whenever I try to shut down or just log out, it gets as far as that blank gray screen and no further. So, then its a hard shutdown and start-up.

So, naturally I’ve been wasting time trying to get to the bottom of it: resetting various mysterious acronyms (PRAM, NVRAM, SMC, PMU, and WTF!), booting from the install disk to repair the disk, and so on and so forth. When shit like this happens, it drives me crazy and I have a hard time ignoring it and moving on to other things until I resolve it. Although sometimes, when the problem is bad but not quite critical, I can manage to bang my head against it for a few hours until my short attention span gets distracted by some shiny object in another part of life. Then I forget about it until comes back to bit me when I least expect it. These past couple weeks have offered plenty of distractions. So, to be honest, I’m behind on solving this, too. I have not been able to face wiping the disk and reinstalling everything. sigh… next week.