It’s a miracle!
I can blog.

This morning I awakened to the sound of Doug’s laughter.  No
problem, I’d been in bed about ten hours–hadn’t slept all that time,
but I got enough shuteye, more than I’ve been getting most nights
lately.

What a change from yesterday, when he was scowling, snarling, and
killing pedestrians on the PS2!  He was on the couch, looking at
the PS2 monitor, but I could tell from the fact that he didn’t have the
controller in his hands that he was using the PlayStation as a DVD
player.  I asked him,

The computer was on.  I looked at the monitor, did a double take, and stepped closer.

I checked for comments here and on Greyfox’s “gettin’ better” blog, did
my morning ablutions, and got a muffin and cup of tea to get my blood
sugar up.  (notice the order in which I take care of
business)  By that time Laurel and Hardy were done and Bob Hope,
Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour were on the Road to Bali. 

I told Doug to take off his headphones and turn on the speakers so I
could hear, too.  (Funny, I never noticed before that la Lamour
wore a corset… but back then even my mother wore a girdle.  She
got me a panty girdle not long after I talked her into getting me a
“training bra”, and made me wear it.  Heaven forfend that my
natural shape should show!  And bras back then were circular
stitched, shaped like nose-cones–did you ever wonder WHY
women took such joy from burning them?  It’s odd, now that most of
us let it all hang out and jiggle, to recall a time when that was infra
dig for most women, and a few men.

Enough of that little jog down memory lane.  Back to the future… uuuh, present.

During one of the gratuitious musical interludes in the comedy movie,
Doug explained that the operation hadn’t been so simple as just
unplugging the malfunctioning video card.  After he tried that,
the comp didn’t work at all and he had to plug it back in and do some
hocus pocus he only referred to but did not explain.  He did say
that they make it really easy to install these upgrades, but removing
them is another story.  He also said something that indicated some
gratitude to his ancestors (that’s me, in part) for his native
intelligence.  I’ll second that gratitude.

This video display is taking some getting used to.  It’s odd, we
both agree *more laughter* not having all that wavy-line-movement on
the screen.  What’s great is getting all the way through this
entry with no freeze/crash action.  I can get used to it.

Blog Power–

Minimalist blog here, just composing it in Notepad, then a quick copy and paste to xTools, trying hard not to trigger a freeze.

Yesterday, I emailed the computer doc a link to my blog with the screen
shots and description of the problem.  He emailed back that he’s
99.9% sure it’s the memory on the video card.  I spent the whole
day yesterday fiddling with this machine, running diagnostics and doing
cleanup work.  I deleted several hundred cookies, until my neck
and shoulders were hurting too much to continue (Damned Disease!!), and
got up through the letter “C”, right to Greyfox’s Daily Dilbert cookie,
before I quit. By the time Doug got up yesterday evening the C drive
was 95% defragged, and when it froze at that point, we let the rest of
it go.

He went shopping, not very confident of finding a new video card for
this old computer, because he’d had a hard time finding this one that’s
gone wonky on us here now.  But he succeeded, found one faster and
with more onboard memory than this one.  Now we’re waiting for the
Priority Mail to arrive.

It’s important to Doug to have a functional computer this week. 
He’s got a tournament going on.  When I woke today, he was all
bummed out, face like a thundercloud, on the PS2, in GTA Vice City,
maiming and killing to release his tension.  The computer was
off.  He said he’d nearly ruptured the squishy stuffed elephant
that’s his handy tension reliever here beside the keyboard.  Thank
God he hadn’t resorted to the Martian Popping Thing, or it would have
woken me early.

I turned this lovely machine on (sweet talk can’t hurt) and the display
was even worse than those screen shots I posted yesterday.  I gave
it what Greyfox calls the technological laying on of hands,
power-cycled two or three times until I got a readable display, then
let it boot in safe mode far enough that I could do a normal shut down
and restart, and it functioned well enough for Doug to post his first
round in the tourney.

Greyfox just phoned and said he stopped at the internet cafe this
morning and blogged, so that’s my next stop, then I’m off here and back
on the couch in Disgaea with my demon horde for a while.  This
fibro-flare or chronic fatigue relapse or just plain
body-malfunction-syndrome upheaval is worse than usual. 
Yesterday’s activity was stressful even though there were some payoffs
for it.  Today is payback time.