Abbie Schuto is awesome-- also Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have someone like that around to wave her magic wand over our computers? Sigh.
Anyways, I looked at those those external hard drives that you plug in and leave (duct tape is an excellent idea, by the way) but ended up getting a larger one that attaches via USB cable. It's not quite as convenient (I plug it in about once a week or so and it copies the laptop hard drive in the background), but I like having a copy of everything someplace separate from my laptop in case another cup of tea gets tipped-- I was worried it would fry both laptop and backup at the same time.
My laptop suffered far more than I did from the hot tea vs. cat incident: the space bar and touch pad were never really the same. I'm just glad that no one was around at the time-- it was winter and I shucked off my skirt (thick & wooly) before the hot tea soaked through, but suspect that I looked rather comical jumping around shaking my laptop upside down, trying to get the tea to drain out the keyboard, in just my knickers...
-Jean
