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Okay, so here’s the story. I hope it’ll break your heart.

A couple of weeks ago my CD/DVD drive died. This is nothing new to me. It happens all the time. I buy a new one, it works nicely for 2 years, and after 2 years and 1 day (as soon as the warranty expires) it dies so I have to buy a new one. I’ve grown used to it, I don’t even complain about the fact that the cheap crap from China only lasts from noon until 12pm anymore. No offense, China, you probably also produce a lot of expensive high quality stuff. But I’m poor and I can usually only afford the cheap crap that you also produce.

Anyway, there used to be a time when a working DVD drive was absolutely essential to me because I only had a 80GB HD drive and I had to burn stuff to DVD all the time in order to have enough space on my HD so I could download new stuff. But earlier this year I bought myself a new 320GB HD. That’s a lot of space, so I didn’t really have to burn everything on DVD right away anymore. So when my DVD drive died a few weeks ago buying a new one wasn’t exactly on the top of my priorities list because I still had way over 200GB of empty space on my HD.

But then December 18, 2009 approached. It’s the Friday before Christmas, and if you’ve been following my blog for a long time you may remember what that means. The Friday before Christmas is Little Lord Fauntleroy Day. Little Lord Fauntleroy, the made-for-TV movie from 1980, starring Alec Guinness and a very young, very blonde and long-haired Ricky Schroeder. They show it on TV every year on the Friday before Christmas at 8:15pm. They have been doing it for 15 or 20 years, and there is now way I’m ever gonna miss it. I’d rather miss Christmas than Little Lord Fauntleroy. And I don’t even have a TV. But I have the film on DVD, and every year on the Friday before Christmas at 8:15pm I pop in the DVD and watch it. I won’t even answer the phone while watching it. And I don’t know what you’ll be doing on December 22, 2023 at 8:15pm, but if I’m still alive I’ll be watching Little Lord Fauntleroy. Because I need it!

However…

In order to watch Little Lord Fauntleroy on DVD I needed a working DVD drive. My nephew had bought himself a new netbook back in October so he didn’t use his old PC anymore, which is why I borrowed his DVD drive. It installed nicely on my PC, but whenever I inserted a disc my PC would freeze. Nothing would work anymore, not even CTRL+ALT+DEL, and I’d have to manually restart my computer. Okay, I thought, this DVD drive is defective, so I decided to buy a new one after all. Because I needed to watch Little Lord Fauntleroy today.

Bought a new drive, installed it, same problem. Computer would freeze. Very weird. I googled the problem and it turned out that this happened to a lot of people with a lot of different computer configurations, and there were a lot of possible solutions. However, none of them worked for me. So I put the problem on hold because I had other, more pressing things to do. Until this morning. I needed to watch LLF tonight, so I tried everything to get my new DVD drive to work. To no avail. Even worse: I killed my computer in the process. Sudenly NOTHING would work anymore, it wouldn’t even boot. Worst case scenario. Because I don’t have the money to buy a new PC.

So I went over to my nephew and borrowed his old PC in order to take the best parts from his PC and the best parts of my PC and try to put them together into something that worked. I was playing Frankenstein. I took dead body parts from 3 or 4 old computers and put them together, hoping that the moster I created would somehow… come to life.

And it did. At around 8pm tonight I had a working computer again. However, for some reason my nephew’s DVD drive couldn’t read my Little Lord Fauntleroy DVD. Everything worked. Except the DVD drive. So I ripped it out and installed the new DVD drive I had bought just a couple of days ago, the one that apparently had killed my PC. And at 8:11pm I inserted my Little Lord Fauntleroy DVD and suddenly I heard the first couple of notes from America the Beautiful which is played at the beginning of the movie.

That’s when I started to cry.

Little Lord Fauntleroy is one of the cheesiest tearjerkers in the history of television, but that’s fine with me because on the Friday before Christmas I want, I need a cheesy tearjerker. And not any cheesy tearjerker, but this one. I usually only start crying some 25 or 30 minutes into the film, but tonight I started crying right at the beginning because all day long it hadn’t looked like I’d be able to watch it tonight, which would have devastated me, but in the end I somehow made it work.

So yeah, that was good, and for some 90 minutes I was a happy, weeping Kamichan. Now that the movie is over I’m only a weeping Kamichan, because I’m on this new computer, I don’t have any of my settings or bookmarks or programs or my address book or Japanese language support, and it’ll take me a couple of days to install it all and get back to where I was yesterday when I had a working computer of my own. If you don’t hear from me for a day or two then it’s because I’ve run into more problems, so please bear with me.

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