my Mac may finally be giving up the ghost

This isn't a good sign:

I'm working on it. At least I've got WiFi thanks to my GlocalMe device. It looks as if I'm going to have to wipe everything from my laptop and reinstall from the ground up. I may have to purchase updated versions of programs I had installed, like Photoshop. That's going to suck. At least iTunes will be part of the OS reinstallation. I can get right back to bingeing "Burn Notice." The downside is that I will have lost my book-review book project, which I had stored on my desktop, not on my external drive. Lesson learned.