Last night, while I was waiting for my work laptop to clone, I swapped the hard drive out of my late 2010 Macbook Pro into a spare late 2008 MbP I bought as a decommissioned unit from WRI. The 2010 model was suffering from a random shutdown issue, where it would simply blink itself off, and I was getting fed up with it. I’d installed a SSD drive a few years ago so the process was straightforward and easy. The recipient machine only has 4MB of RAM but that should be good enough for the basic stuff I use it for these days. When I stop to think that I bought that machine eight and a half years ago and it’s worked trouble-free for the majority of that time, I have to appreciate the quality and value of Apple gear. 

This morning I was on the road by 7:30 to run errands before the storm; I was out of the grocery store by 9 with a completed grocery list. At 10 I had an appointment to meet a lady about a rear cargo cover for the CR-V, which she was selling on Craigslist. This accessory was absent when we bought our car, and I always found them handy to have (my 1982 Subaru GL had one) especially when parking in the city. In 5 minutes the deal was done (they also threw in a set of OEM lug nuts they had laying around) and as we chatted they told me they’d sold their 2005 model with 280,000 miles on the odometer. Our ‘V only has 120K so I think we’re in good shape for another couple of years. 

After that were more errands; I sold a couple of lousy XBOX games at the Gamespot so that I could buy a copy of LEGO Star Wars for us, picked up a new metal snow shovel at the Lowe’s, and did some other boring crap.

When I got home we made some lunch and got down to the depressing business of packing up all of the Christmas gear. Within about an hour we had the tree uncovered and out at the curb, and after hunting down and sweeping up all the pine needles we took another hour to straighten up the house.

Then Finn and I took the chainsaw out back to see if I could get it to start. With a little new gas in the tank and the proper choke setting it fired right up and settled into a nice throaty roar. The chain didn’t move at all, which means one of several things: there isn’t enough chain lube, the chain is too tight, on backwards, or misaligned. I’ll try chain lube first and work my way through the other issues afterwards.

Update: It was the chain brake. All I had to do was reset it and the chain spun straight away. Finn and I picked up some chain lube later in the week (the reservoir was dry) and with that I should be able to start breaking down the big stumps in the yard.