Tuesday night last week, I took the bus out to a venue we have not managed to get to for approx 6 months due to not being able to get a team together. It was good to know we were finally going to get back there, however on plugging into the electricity supply the bus trips out, after some investigation and several more trips we discover the problem lies with the downstairs lighting circuit, we have no lights, without lights we cant run a session so the bus is back off the road again until I can get an electrician to come and sort the bus out. 
Wednesday morning last week got into the office and first job was to send out an email with the news of the previous night. Plug in laptop, dead, comes up with read error, press any key to reboot press any key gets diddly squat, a dead hard drive! I did by Friday evening manage to recover files, today I am working from home waiting for a delivery of new parts (although the web site from where I ordered them and paid extra for delivery today still havent shipped the whole order so will I get it all or any of it?). Anyway that is why the longish silence, I was still in the process of sorting out the laptop after a major software crash a few weeks back (maybe Dave was right when he told me all those years ago that one day the mighty pen would rule again!)
Anyway today as well as hoping to be able to start getting the laptop back up and running I am also going to try and get my email working again on this computer (a rather old desktop at home) and see what I should have done and who I should have been in touch with during my almost weeklong computer black hole existence.
I hope normal services will resume later this week (although possibly not here as I am sure there are other things I need to catch up with but I will at least try and update you in the story when I can).
God bless you all TTFN
Update: within 5 mins of publishing the above there was a knock on the door and the new hard drive is now in my possession! Not sure about the blank DVDs or memory upgrade I ordered but at least I can now start on getting the thing up and running again!