Odds and ends

First and foremost, I must tell you that Christina’s computer woes are, at least for the present, over! And I must also thank and congratulate The Pointmaster, a.k.a. Hale McKay, a.k.a. Michael Ashley for offering the tip that solved the problem.

For those of you who don’t want to go back to yesterday’s post and comments and see, Mike pointed out (ahem... he IS the “Pointmeister,” after all) that sometimes, once a computer has successfully started in “safe mode” and then been rebooted, the problem heals itself.

(Or goes into hiding, only to surface later at the worst possible time. Mike didn’t say that; I’m just being pessimistic. Given the nature of the con... oops. You know what I mean!)

I wasn’t looking forward to trying to repair the boot sector of the hard drive, much less wiping the whole thing, re-installing Windows and all the other software, putting the data files back where they belonged, and all the rest of THAT noise. That would have taken DAYS, plus Christina would have had to send me the laptop and been without her computer for weeks.

I also wanted to avoid a “system restore” back to a previous point in time. I’ve done that, and as a repair it’s iffy at best.

So thanks Mike! And thanks to the others who offered tips or at least sympathy. Some times I’ll take all of that I can get!


Next, please pause with me for a moment of silence as you view the photo below.



Yes, those are the LAST THREE cookies from our ski trip. Those scrumptious oatmeal, wheat germ, peanut butter, chocolate chip cookies that taste so wonderful. They’re all gone. Til next year, my tasty friends, adieu!

Sigh.



And finally (I’m not sure if this is an “odd” or an “end”), today was chilly and drizzly with one hard shower in the afternoon, so there was no golf today. I spent most of the afternoon preparing queries to send to literary agents for my novel.

I found a few more agents who would accept email queries, and sent those off. One, to my amazement, actually indicated he wanted attachments to the email! These were to contain a synopsis and sample chapters.

So far he is the ONLY agent I’ve found who will even dare to OPEN an email with an attachment, let alone open the attachment itself! They all seem convinced that attachments are the evil spawn of Satan himself, and will infect their systems with agent-eating viruses.

Gee, MY anti-virus software scans incoming email attachments just like every other file, and either deletes or quarantines those with problems. Guess agents haven’t had time to read about that software yet, since they’re so busy reading the 700 queries per week that keep pouring into their mailboxes.

Anyway, I also prepared snail mail queries to send out next week.

I’ll let you know about responses when they come.