Miette is crawling her way back to life. My Web Confidential and Quicken files were saved. And I found a blog of an old friend / coworker today. But, there's still a ways to go before I can really start catching up.
The saving of the iMac could not have happened without the
iPod. I was able to turn it into an emergency Mac OS X boot disk loaded with some drive utils. It was almost cute - the scrappy and increasingly multipurpose little iPod trying to save a sisters life. They ran throughout the night, but it was ultimately in vain. The disk utils said "hey, we can help with these things over here, but it will come at the expense of these things over there". After wrapping up some backing up to the iPod and a separate hard drive, the re-install process commenced, and the hard drive's gotten a good cleaning.
Here's hoping the hotsync goes well.