Thursday, March 26, 2015

Happy to be Heading to Bed Tonight



I’m very happy to be heading to bed tonight after I post this. The day began on an ominous note. I was up very early (5 a.m.) and waiting when the little Walmart Neighborhood Grocery opened at 6 - I needed kitty litter, coffee, and copy paper for our monthly senior mobile home park newsletter which I planned to begin printing around 10.

I got home in good time, before 6:30. I set to making coffee and some cold cereal for breakfast. Then I turned on the computer so I could check emails and to see if any Etsy orders came in (they don’t do that often, but I do need to check). Unfortunately, the computer wouldn’t turn on. 

At night, I always flip off the switch on the surge protector before I go to bed. In the morning, I turn it on, then the PC tower, then the printer makes a little tone to announce it is ready, and the monitor turns on its little light, and the monitor is supposed to announce the PC is ready by loading W7. I pressed the surge protector, then the Power On, on the tower, and everything except the computer itself went on. I did this several times, allowing time between attempts. Nothing. 

Ok. I decided to avoid downright mind-numbing sheer-terrorific panic. I absolutely had to print this newsletter today. It should have been done yesterday but our Park management needed me to add something and it took me a while to rearrange the paragraphs to fit it in yesterday and I need several hours for the printing, so today was IT. 

After I went numb, I thought I’d just try one thing at a time before I tried calling either my brother, or a dear friend who used to do PCs but now sticks to printers, or a fellow in our park who does PCs. Ok, so I wiggle all the plugs, making sure they are all in nice and tight. They are. The surge protector strip is up top on my desk, but it usually manages to “walk” to the back and tip down an inch off the back. At that moment, it was nice and flat on the desk, and on a whim, I tipped it off that inch. Then I tried again.

This time, it came on. But not Windows. Nope. It gave me a “boot screen” which asked me whether I wanted to hit F1 to Continue or DEL to go to Setup. Setup sounded like something I did not want to tackle so I chose to Continue. 

That did it. It came on. I decided that even though it was only 7 a.m. at that moment, I’d better get that printing started then and there and not take chances of something going wrong later.

A few other things got a little iffy during the day, but were easily dealt with.

And there was even a treat. Marco’s Pizza has a few chain locations in town and one is just about a mile or two from here. I get emails from them but haven’t bought any since my “nephew” passed away a year ago, for many reasons, money being one. I got an email saying this was their Spinach deal day and if we brought in a can of spinach for the local food bank, we could walk out with a free medium grilled Chicken Florentine pizza - how great is that? I must have emailed and called a zillion friends near this location. I grabbed my one neighbor, the one who is now on 24/7 oxygen, and we went in with our Pizza Money (a can of spinach) and came out with a free pizza each. I haven’t had that in a whole year -  I do NOT want to tell anyone how many pieces I ate when I got mine home!

After a shower and a half an hour on the back steps while the kitty lounged on the ground nearby (and I caught up on some Reader’s Digests which a friend passes to me when he is done), it was time to close up.

So the day eventually ended well, but getting to that point was a little tricky. All in all, it was good when looking at the overall picture.

Still, it will feel very good to crawl into that bed after I send this. ‘nite all - have a good one.

2 comments:

Damaris said...

I' m happy for you.

Evelyn Mayfield said...

Thanks for caring. The next day, the PC wouldn't go on at all. I was offline for a few days during which a friend gave me an old laptop which I'm now using and another friend is trying one more thing on the desktop tower to see if we can revive it - thank God for friends - thank God for God!