Confession

Many years ago, and I mean MANY years ago, when I was a mere lass of 8 yrs of age, I noticed a particular oddity that was inherently, it seemed, to belong just to me. When my family including myself, would go to our hunting camp in Waldo,Maine, one of our chores was to cut fire wood. My Mom, Stepfather, my brother and me would tramp out into the woods to bring back fire wood that my Stepfather had cut with the chainsaw. No one seemed to notice how I operated, even me, until I fell.

I wasn't on the path. In fact, I had never been on the well worn path that led back and forth from camp to wood pile. Not only did I not walk on the path, ever; but I had this need to go a different way every time I took the trip out there, which could add up to thirty times a day or more for a week. The day I fell, I remember very clearly to this day, the thought that went through my oh-so-young mind. "Peggy, you never follow the path." And I knew that it was symbolic, though I could not have explained it so eloquently then, of how I operated in life and would continue to operate. I was quite joyous of the whole idea. I don't know why, because even then I knew that this need of mine to go my own way was going to cause some serious problems in my life. I saw them, then, as future adventures.

OK. Now we are up to today. Or rather this past week. Anybody wonder where I went after I had come back so strongly? Hmmm, maybe not. But I will tell you anyway. I was surfing the net right after the last time I was on Gather, and I noticed some shadowy sorts of commands that would often appear at the top of my page. Any other time I ignore them, and they disappear. But that day, I was on a different path. One came down that said, "Disable Touch Pad." Ever so curious, I used my touch pad to maneuver the cursor over the command and clicked it. Why? I don't know. But suddenly I had a frozen cursor. I knew I had frozen it, but I had no idea what those ghostly commands were or where they'd come from, so I decided that my computer had been cursed with a virus.

I turned the computer off and rebooted. Cursor wouldn't move. AND I though I could get on line, I had to maneuver the action around the screen by using a combination of alts, arrows there on the right on my keyboard, and finding other ways to bring the windows page into materializing. I attempted to come back on to gather and I did, I believe, write one letter on the mail. That short paragraph took me an hour. I was beat. So what did I do?

I went into the default section and deleted touchpad. Why you may ask? I don't know. I booted and rebooted this computer until it began to scream for intervention from the neighbors. I laughed and said, "we have no neighbors except Ed. And he can't hear you and he hates me." Ok, that didn't happen. But I did boot, reboot, try every combination I could think up in my little world, and entered areas on the computer where angels of geeks dare not tread. Then it came to me. Restore the hard drive. I had the disks. And at first I attempted to do only the touchpad. It took an entire day to find a combination of keys that would allow me to jumpstart loading back up the touchpad that I had deleted. Didn't work. It loaded, but remained frozen. For three days I sat in here while the dogs whined and the horses whinnied for attention, glued to this 'problem.' Even the Lion Rabbit sat beneath my truck staring at my bedroom window (the warmest room in the house) and I could see his fat little nose or rather not so little anymore, nose, wiggling and wriggling, trying to figure out where his carrots were.

I called Toshiba. The techie said, "Press FN. Press F9 with it. Now let go." Shazam! My touchpad was engaged! It took less than a minute, truly to have my cursor back. So now, with a stripped but workable laptop, attached to my ISP, I can come back online. Of course I haven't been able to pay the phone bill so if I disappear again....