what's cooking?

This week was NOT what anyone would call easy. I've even decided to call it "A Streetcar Named Desire". Quite appropriate, I assure you.

Last Friday evening I posted my somewhat witty column as usual. Spread the word to all the regular stops and pinged it. Went on to weeding through a mountain of e-mails, put it in sleep mode and went to make dinner.

Hours later, I went to bed and hubby went to put our virus scan program through its paces. He was greeted by a black screen which said "a error has occurred in the above program, you will need to re-install."

Small problem: NO PROGRAM WAS LISTED

Thankful that our 5 year old antique had scads of remaining tech support hours, my husband immediately got on the phone with some gentleman in India. He was on there until 2:30 in the morning.

I was greeted with the horrible news within moments of my awakening.

NOOOO, I wailed. Think Geek Squad commercial. "Don't worry, Adam and I will be at work the entire day, use his laptop". That placated me UNTIL the same thing happened to his computer.

Well, I was in such a state of shock, I completely blacked out. Okay, not literally, but as a former dancer whose favorite musical is "Chicago", I'm borrowing one of Velma Kelly's lines-sue me.

Guess what-when Adam got home, he no longer thought I was such a Sarah Bernhardt. His wailing was infinitely louder than mine.

So there the 3 of us stood, staring at our broke computers, completely cut off from our cyberworld friends and business associates.

Let's get to how this is lie "A Streetcar Named Desire". On Sunday, I was telling my sister about our predicament. She said I could come over and use one of theirs.
I think I made the two mile drive in less than five minutes. That included putting the dog out, hobbling to and warming up my car.

I felt relief as soon as I was able to get to my e-mails and hunt around a couple of sites.

Monday rolled around and I could hardly wait to get to the day job-I had to get to my e-mails after 17 hours.

All week (here's the Blanche character connection) I had to "rely on the kindness of others" to check e-mails, respond to questions and look at some sites.

We realized black Friday for us would actually mean braving the local electronic store and buying new computers. Ugh.

Then our brother-in-law David got on the phone for one last ditch effort-he and my husband somehow got both computers running by 3 a.m.. Hubby worked at getting everything re-programmed during most of Thanksgiving Day. We sighed with relief that we didn't need to buy anything. We still couldn't open the saved discs that had be re-entered, but we were happy to at least be partially up and running.

Until now, I was just about to post this column early when the same thing happened to my computer-almost again. It's not well, but while I have the ability to use my son's laptop, I'm posting this as fast as possible.

No way of knowing how long I'm going to keep relying on "the kindness of others"!