You won't believe it....

Everything happened! Here's the sequence: Thurs nite, went to shut down this machine. It wouldn't. Finally gave up and turned it off manually. Friday, after getting home from breakfast on the hotel patio, turned it on. It refused to load Windows XP Home. Just cycled and cycled round and round to the "safe" page.

That did it. I hauled it off to Peter, the genius computer guy at Micro-Mechanics. Half hour later, Peter calls and tells me to bring the disk. He may have to reinstall Windows. YIKES!!! I bring the disk.

Sat afternoon, late, I phone Peter. He believes the hard disk is contaminated. So far, he's tried five different de-contaminiation programs with no success and is carrying on. Told him to save whatever he could.

Sunday. Peter's not working.

Monday: He's working on it...

Tuesday (today): Peter calls and says, "Come and get it." I'm out the door in a split second. Peter has saved everything. It's working beautifully. I ask what was wrong. And he says, "orphaned files". "Say what? What are those?" To which Peter asks, "When did you last defrag this computer?"

Now that's an "oh, shit" question for sure. I wince and admit that I never had. And that was the problem. So much stuff saved, files flung all over, got so bad that Windows couldn't locate the file it needed to open Windows. Peter had defragged. Now I'm on cable, but defragging increased the speed! Promised Peter I'd defrag every month without fail. And he charged me only $70!!! Don't know when I've ever felt so damned stupid.

Talk about being cut off from the world! I read everything in sight. I tied up all the cords into neat little bundles. I looked at photo albums. And when I got this computer home this afternoon, it had 451 emails waiting.

But it's Tues, and so at 4:50 this aft, I headed for the writers' gathering in Old Town. Got back at 7:45 this eve or thereabouts and have been dealing with email since. Still have 48 to go. Will do those tomorrow. Enough already!

Was just tickled to have an email from CB (Colby Buzzell)--the guy in the Stryker Brigade in Mosul, Iraq, whose blog, "My War", drew so much attention, the brass shut him down. And now that he's back, he's just had the 2nd in his series of articles published in Esquire! He said he'd never in his life dreamed he'd be writing for Esquire! Or writing, for that matter. And like always, he's telling it like it is and mincing no words.

Was damned neat to have your comments waiting too! And now I'll go see what Workaholic and Cate have been up to....
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