My Mac: Sleeping Beauty

stop the drama!

I usually put my computer to sleep whenever I'm away for any length of time.

Yesterday, I left the house right before 4:00, and went out for the evening. (Happy Birthday, Jud!)
When we came home late last night, I went to my computer to check my email. (no, I'm not addicted) Much to my chagrin, it wouldn't wake up! It didn't seem to respond at all.

So, I did what any good trouble-shooter would do: I restarted my computer (hard restart by keeping the power button down, then pressing it again to start).

Again - nothing.

Although, it sounded like it was restarting. I could hear the disc spin, but nothing came up on the screen at all - just a blank, black screen.

Then I did the next step that any good trouble-shooter would do: try starting it with the system disk. Still nothing. (though I could hear the drive reading the CD, and it sure sounded like it was booting from the CD!)

When I work at home, I always connect my laptop to an external monitor, and even that was completely black. Tried unplugging it, replugging, unplugging.... (I had also since removed all other peripheral, so I was working on my laptop alone.)

I hoped that this meant that it was a monitor problem, or a board problem, and hopefully NOT a drive problem.

...and then I went to play golf....

Came back, did some research, and eventually, found this: Topic : Blank Screen - even when booted from the CD - Weird Sleep Cycle perhaps?

No good answers here: sounds like it's a logic board problem.

boo.

I've made an appt. with The Genius Bar at the Apple Store for tomorrow. Let's see what they say.

So, how come it doesn't sound like I'm completely freaking out?!

Oh, I am, believe me, but I've also realized that it could be much worse.

Here's the good news:

I have a backup: I'm using Time Machine, and haven't had to use it for anything big yet, but it has been backing up my hard drive for the past few months. I trust it's doing something good for me.

I also keep full backups of my most important files in full on my external drive.

But that's certainly not enough to keep me calm.

The real reason I'm not totally freaking out is because I just figured out that I can access my computer's drive through our network. I'm copying over all of my super-important files to our extra PowerBook right now. At least I know I have access to it! (and I know that my drive is okay, even if I can see anything on my computer right now.)

I'm installing all of my regular apps onto our second laptop so I can use it as a backup computer in case mine needs to go into the shop for a while. Certainly not ideal, but much, much better than the alternative.