Saturday

Mr. K has taken J out to the hardware store. N is playing with K, so I have a chance to use the computer in peace briefly.

I was out picking tomatoes this morning, and J came out to see me, wearing, without socks, black, vinyl boots she got from her cousin. As she was walking through some tall grass we are growing for our rabbits, she suddenly started screaming. A yellow jacket had gone down into her boot and was stinging her. We got the boot off, and I yelled for Mr. K. He carried her back into the house for me.

The picture is of her boot.

I'm planning to learn to can tomatoes today. Also, we'll try to do another round of peaches.

Yesterday, my computer was down most of the day. My computer has been running slower and slower so I tried to install Vista Service Pack 2 Thursday night, and it was hug up on "1 of 3, 4 %" all night. I had to hit the power button a bunch of times, and the percentage of install creeped upward. Finally it told me the install had failed, and that it was reverting to it's previous state. It hung up there, and I called a computer guy whose number I found in the yellow pages.

He told me there wasn't much he could do (short of reinstalling the operating system) until Vista got reverted, and that it sounded like I had a virus that kept it from being installed, and that had slowed down my computer beforehand. I pushed the power bar a couple times after my computer just sat doing nothing. Finally I tried to do it in Safe Mode. In ten or fifteen minutes, it had reverted and had reached safe mode. I called the guy back and arranged for him to come over late yesterday afternoon.

He did. H ran several types of virus checks, and was surprised not to find anything. Probably I don't have a virus. He put on some utilities and removed a bunch of junk that came with the computer that I don't use. He got it running much better again, but I'm still not willing to run that new service pack. It just came out, and I want to wait to see if it will need patches. He told me my "fix" is temporary, and what I really need to do is reinstall the operating system from the disk that came with my computer. Yikes! I'm worried I'll forget to backup stuff not in normal locations, and that I won't be able to get my Internet up and running. So for now I'm doing nothing (dumb I know). Maybe I'll try to get everything backed up really well (mail and bookmarks are of special concern to me), and then try to do it at the beginning of the week. Then if I screw things up, I can try to give him a call.