Scary Time!

I woke up bright and early this past Tuesday morning -well, Okay, it wasn't exactly bright yet and neither was I because I woke up at 4 a.m. which means it was still dark out. Yeah, I know all too frequently that's maybe about the time I would be going to bed but I've been trying to develop a tiny bit better sleeping habits you see. That night, I had actually crashed around 1 a.m.

But, because regardless of the time I go to bed, I almost always wake up after having slept about 3 1/2 to 4 hours cause my bladder doesn't seem to hold that much, that long any more -either that or I might be a medical anomaly and need to get checked for prostate cancer. (Frequent urination is a symptom of that, isn't it?) So anyway, I was up at 4 a.m.

Now, I probably could have gone back to bed then but instead, since the computer has been hogged a lot lately between Katie and her "My Space" and Mandy with her Facebook, My Space and CafeMom stuff. Add to that the fact that Bill has been doing a lot of surfing the past week or so -for hours on end -looking for volkswagon parts. All of this cuts deeply into the amount of time left for me to play on the computer too, ya know!

Well, Monday night when Bill was surfing, he was grumping a lot too -complaining about how damned slow this computer was running and such. So when I found myself up that early in the morning, I decided it was time to do a bit of clean-up then on the computer that might result in this baby running a tad better and faster. So I did the Disc Clean thing and then the defrag.

In the meantime, before I did those things, I wanted first to respond to an e-mail I had received and imagine my surprise when I tried to type my message and the keys depressed but evidently they were using invisible type on my screen because nothing was showing up there! WTF!

I did the cleaning and defrag stuff -which I might add seemed to take forever! Yeah, things were really running VERY slow here!

Then along about 7 a.m. or so, I noticed this strange beep-beep-beeping noise -not really loud but loud enough that I noticed it at any rate. It kind of sounded like this really obnoxious alarm clock that Bill has that does this really horrid, very, VERY LOUD beep-beep-beeping and which he doesn't seem to hear and relies on Mandy or Kate to turn the damned thing off every morning instead of him getting up himself to hit the snooze button. (Ah ha -now there is yet another of those little irritating things I wrote about in an earlier post today and I had forgotten about how much this stupid alarm clock annoys me if it goes on and on and on, almost forever, so mornings!)

But again, my rambling style kicked in there and I was digressing. My apologies. Let's get back to the computer problems.

This beeping kept on and on -but still fairly faint and that noise, plus the fact I couldn't type in anything anywhere on the computer compelled me about 8:30 a.m. to call a friend on the other end of town to see if he was busy. He just happens to know a lot about computers and problems and how to fix things, etc. and used to work on my old computer for me all the time.

well, Bobby said he would come over in a little while and take a look at things and that he might have to take the computer over to his house and work on it the next day.

SAY WHAT? You can't work on it till tomorrow? I almost yelled that in a really high-pitched squeaky voice I get when I am really, really upset!

Ok, I calmed down and said that would be fine. It would have to be ok because I knew I sure as heck couldn't afford to take this thing into the computer shop and leave it there for how knows how long it would take them to even look at it.

Well, Bobby showed up about two hours later, listened, heard the beep-beeping, saw that the typing wasn't registering and promptly removed the case to begin by doing a little cleaning out around the fan area.

Before he got the case off, he scared the living bejesus out of me when he remarked that he hoped I hadn't fried my poor lovely little computer if the fan was all plugged up and such. And then, when he took the case off to clean with his neat little can of "Duster" I think he was sure that was going to be the case because the accumulation of dust was well, it really was almost unimaginable that this machine could accumulate that much in the way of dust balls and not catch itself on fire or some such!

My next-door neighbor had told me a couple weeks ago -when I asked him about cleaning the dust out -that all I needed to do was to remove the cover and just "brush it away." When I mentioned having been told that, I could see poor Bobby cringe then as he asked me if I'd done that and I told him no, cause I couldn't figure out how to get the case to come off!

Well, he "dusted" and he "dusted" and he "dusted some more and more and more till finally, the insides looked like new -shiny, clean and such.

We turned it back on in hopes that all would now be okay only to hear the damned beep-beeping yet again and still, no typing that could be seen either.
After snooping around some more, pulling this connection and that one, finally when Bobby disconnected the keyboard, the beeping stopped. So he asked if I still might have a keyboard around from the old computer -one that worked that is. I thought I did but neither Mandy nor I could find it, so Bobby went back home and found one he had laying around at his house, brought it over, hooked it up and Presto-Magic, it worked!

Seems the keyboard I had here was pretty much -well fried!

And in between answering Bobby's questions, trying to find things, and all, in my mind I was thinking about what I might have to do if in fact this computer had been dead in the water.

Heaven knows, I sure can't afford to buy another new desktop but maybe, just maybe, if it turned out to be the worst case scenario, I could at least find a laptop to replace this puppy. But then again, new laptops don't come cheap either so maybe a used one would work. Whatever. But I was worried and yes indeedy, let me tell you, I was scared too -darned scared -because I knew going without my computer/internet/blogging fix daily would send my system into a withdrawal of a mega magnitude and a whole lot of other little things that irritate would be doing a royal number on my head then, for sure!

But thankfully, all is well that ends well and Wednesday night, Mandy picked up a new keyboard for me and we can return the one Bobby loaned us now too!

But you know, all this did get me to thinking a bit anyway that having some kind of laptop would really be nice here cause then I could surf to my heart's content and not worry about having to share all the time with the rest of the computer hogs in the house!