Welly, welly, well, when I went to turn on my only friend today (my computer), it was having a little trouble. OK, let's not mince words, it was having a lot of trouble. Aw, screw it, it was kaput en la cabeza. The first clue was when the screen came up a color that I hadn't chosen for the background. Next was all the familiar desktop icons were gone. You know you're screwed when the "Start" button doesn't work to shut down or restart. My entire afternoon was spent scanning the disks for errors, getting through to Dell tech support, and then speaking with an Indian guy to fix the derned thing.

Long afternoon short, the A's beat down the Red Sox again (why do they even think they can win the World Series?), I patched a tube on my B bike, did assorted cleaning, and I didn't have to re-install Windows or any drivers. The damage is, in fact, minimal compared to the feeling of dread and doom when you turn on your computer and it doesn't do exactly what you expect it to do. I lost all the websites I saved as Favorites in IE, my Earthlink dial-up is a little funny, but I can deal with that, and I can't figure out how to turn Norton Anti-Virus back on. Probably a bunch of other stuff is gone, too, that I'll find out about in time. I'm glad I didn't have to re-install Windows, thereby losing everything on my hard drive. Wake-up call to back everything up somewhere. To you, too!

Is it just me, or is anyone else addicted to online? After the whole afternoon of my computer being sick, I had to go check my usual haunts of websites to make sure everything was alright or if anyone had missed me. Everything was fine, Netflix can somehow go on without me, and no one had missed me. Bastards.