"DO NOT WANT!"

"NNNOOOOOooo-o-o-o-o-o! ! ! ! !"

That's what I said this morning--or a less polite word to that effect--after the guy at the Apple computer store spent 15 minutes trying to fix my frozen Orestes and the Fly project in iMovie and then declared,
"I'm afraid one of the files is corrupt and I can't fix it: you may have to rebuild the whole project."

So far as I can tell, it's not my fault, or anyone else's, but this is the kind of thing that makes me want to stab myself with a fork.

Actually, it turned out not to be all that awfully bad. The project (that's the movie broken up into all its bits and pieces--audio, timing, titles, etc.--like a car motor in parts) is still in iMovie so I can save and export it (burn it to a DVD. etc.), but only "as is," it cannot be edited further. Luckily, the editing was almost entirely done.

There remain those 3 little undone things, however, that are little, yes, but without them the movie does not work.
So I'll have to do some roundabout import/export/import stuff--sort of like when I sent a box of instant Pad Thai mix to a friend in New Mexico and she pointed out that it was Made in California, so the box had practically made a round trip on an airplane.

It will all LOOK just fine in the end, to the audience. But last night, after the thing froze up on me, I was pondering the meaning of life big time, I tell you. I had to resort to that old My Life As a Dog comparison trick and think, well, this is nowhere near as bad as dying of malaria.
And I had to laugh when I saw the door labeled Panic at the mall this morning. So well placed, right on the way to the Apple store.