I ended up buying a new laptop.
Earlier in the week I wrote about how my laptop crashed. It turns out some combination of the fan being obstructed and years of wear and tear doomed my old hard drive, making it unrealistic to repair without expecting that one day (sooner rather than later) it would ride in its last rodeo.
I have to hand it to the good folks at Mr. Notebook, they worked valiantly to repair the old one and to recover as much information from it as possible.
Unfortunately not every file could be recovered from my old laptop, so I have to merge the files they pulled from it with the files I had backed up online, with the music files I have auto synced through iCloud. Through some combination of the three, I think I can get everything back.
Oh, and then there are all the software re installs. Uggggh.
“First world problems“, I know.