I've been out of the loop for awhile now, mostly because I got a very
nasty virus that snuck in from somewhere and disabled my computer
completely. I think it even disabled my virus software, and it tried hard
to kill my hard-drive. It was a great big shock to me, because I have not
done the back-up I know perfectly well I should have, and therefore I was
facing the terrible possibility that everything on there, all the years of
writing and research, photographs and memories, the Soul of my computer,
or at least the Psyche, was potentially wiped out, irretrievable.

This was not easily accepted and I was forced to realize that it was only
going to hurt for a little while, I'd get over it and move on - perhaps it is
time to leave behind the old puter-self and start over with a new, fresh
Me - like, maybe on a beach where I could forget about this whole mess.

I have to thank my dear friend Gayle Kinsey, who did a heroic job of saving
and salvaging my pathetic puter. She is amazing. She cleaned off an entire
gigabyte of crap - thousands of little files - off my hard-drive and wow, it sure
does work better now!

I am going to take this as a serious warning, however - and I pass it on
to you, dear reader - BACK UP your stuff and run that live update on your
virus software - there are some miserable bugs out there that seem to be
getting worse every day. It could be we are nearing the end of this whole
movie - That beach doesn't sound bad at all to me!