This is not convenient, but not entirely unexpected.
My laptop broke. It was starting to break near the end of last semester, with screen problems that sometimes resulted in complete freezes. I nursed it through the end of finals with the expectation that I would need to send it back for repair now anyway. But it seems I now have no choice. Within the last week or so it has degenerated: the suspend stopped working, the wireless stopped working, and yesterday it started freezing somewhat randomly. Today it no longer boots.
Fortunately I was able to get nearly everything backed up, and in its last act of benevolence it let me sync my palm one more time (which itself is starting to suffer from wear - though it is nearly 6 years old). Unfortunately not *quite* everything got backed up, and I now have email strewn about hither and yon, some local, some not, some recoverable, some not... Same deal with address books and other digital pieces of my life.
IBM will send for it tomorrow and hopefully repair it quickly. But in the meantime I need to remember what life was like before the wonder of laptops. I'll have to take notes by hand and use lab computers for papers and such. How very 20th century...
Edit 1/15: The moral of the story is that you should always blog about your needs, because you never know when some reader will be able to offer you a solution to your problem, like, oh, say, the loan of a laptop. You should also always go to Huey Lewis and the News concerts, even ones far away, because they provide good opportunities for meeing people who might someday be able to solve your problems, like, oh, say, by loaning you a laptop. I'm very astute, so I suspect I will demonstrate how well I've internalized these lessons at some point in the near future.