Repairs are complete
Things weren’t as bad as I originally though — at first I thought all the hard drives (internal AND external) were dead; it turned out that just the internal was completely gone, the externals were OK after a little work. Then I thought I’d somehow turned off my daily backups, leaving me with a month old database to restore from. That wasn’t the case, I’m glad to say. A little work restoring individual applications, and some hassle with java (wouldn’t work until I applied the system updates OS X was holding in the background… duh), and just about everything is OK again. Even spent a little time adding the books that showed up on Project Gutenberg during the week!
I’d like to thank everyone who wrote in with encouragement. Knowing that you enjoy the site and find it useful makes the effort worthwhile. Some of you also wrote in with suggestions for improving the site — keep them coming!