On the Far Shore

I shared so many pictures of the iced over Lake Coyote I felt I owed my readers the more normal look. Well, normal for spring with a heavy snow pack. The "log" in the center of the picture is actually the top of a weir and is the normal width of the stream. The Little Coyote is out of its normal banks and moving along at a right good pace for a head waters. I have hope there is a substantial enough flow to scour the bottom of reeds and grasses that have taken root there in the past years of lesser flow.

Taking this picture yesterday I paused to reflect how wonderful it is to be on the other side of a crisis in the making. There is a special joy and light when you have dodged the bullet be it a near flooding out of your property or a total crash of both your computers. Oh, yes that happened later in the day.

I booted up my laptop with the intention of doing some serious buff and fluff on the hard drive before vacation. Basically this means combing through the photo files and doing CD back ups and deletes or uploading to FlickR but it would not stay up. I rebooted three times before the task bar vanished and it would  not respond to the Start key or any of the fn commands. I copied down the error message before it crashed again and called my neighbor nerd (everyone should have one).

After an on-site visit he determined I had picked up some malware that was going to require me to totally recover - ergo loss of all those photos I was going to sort through without allowing me to sort. I don't routinely download photos to my laptop. I thought most of my photos were on the CD's in my fireproof safe where I found my recovery CD's but as I prepared to load disk one of 23 in all sorts of thoughts and doubt rambled about. Top of that list was whether or not my desktop was also infected and where were its recovery disks? And when did I last back up to the external hard drive?

I called a local friend also on Facebook to see if she had picked up any malware. We both don't do apps on that site. She had seen on Fox News (yes, I actually have a friend that watches Fox - couple really) about McAfee having a fatal update. Evidently it saw a Windows exe file as a virus and deleted it. Hey, I am not going to totally dis McAfee for this - Microsoft does like hiding spyware in its exe files. But how to fix this if you cannot go on line or anything.

You call a friend that does not have XP (yes, I do have a few friends with Vista - see note about Fox News - my friend with the MAC was out of town) and they go to McAfee and download to a CD the fix. Nerd to rescue he came back with the printed directions and the fix. After fixing the laptop I had the courage to start the desktop and immediately update virus protection before it could reboot itself.

Meanwhile while I was off the internet a friend there suggested in regard to my lawsuit I should do daily visualizations of how good it will feel to be on the other side of that after 3 years in August. I found this on Youtube. I actually saw the Highwaymen and the New Christy Minstrels do this song when in college when we were all new.