Beware the Internet
I was tooling around near the beginning of the week, going to my usual websites. Really, I'm pretty dull in my Internet habits: I visit a preset collection of blogs, a few writing forums, the newspaper at my hometown, the newspaper at my town here, and the Institute sites.

But, I also needed to do some research on some classic literature. I wandered off the beaten path. I picked daisies. And the wolf came. I noticed my computer was acting...odd. The browser froze up. It seemed sluggish.

Now in my Windows 98 days, this was common and the cure was a reboot. Today, my husband says "NEVER REBOOT A FUNKY COMPUTER" -- right, I know that. But old habits die hard. I rebooted. Bad Jan...bad bad.

My computer was veddy veddy sick. When I clicked on links, I got redirected to places I did not want to go. When I worked in Word, my computer acted like it had Computer ADD...it would wander off...thinking of other things and my keystrokes would stop stroking. I would have to use the mouse to click on the word document to get the computer's attention. Veddy bad.

My hubby tried to cure it. He tried hard. He tried so hard the computer stopped loading Windows AT ALL. Eek. Thankfully through the magic of he-knows-a-lot-more-than-me, he managed to copy my MyDocuments files onto his USB-thingie. Then he reformatted my computer.

And he used the most recent backup (thankfully only a week old) and the stuff from the My Documents to get everything pretty uptodate. But I'm still trying to get all my emails to work and still running across things that need fixing.

Still...no bad bad computer sickiness.