Pyrotex

Yeah, you don't know what you got 'till it's gone. But the mystery lingers. Why is it gone? The mystery tasks me, like a great white whale somewhere over the horizon.

I am speaking, of course, of the disastrous visit to Office Depot, as elucidated in my previous blog. I am speaking of the root cause of the fact that all my documents (actually, "most", not all) were erased from my hard drives.

The answer was staring me in the face from the day I got my...

I have a five year-old HP computer. It runs XP and it runs very well, thank you.

Woops. I had a computer. Past tense.

Though it ran long and well, and only crapped out while playing Alpha Centauri, my favorite game, I felt that it had slowed down over the years. No telling what was in there, gumming up the works -- viruses, worms, clams, spyware, spudware, cookies, gummybears and other mean and nasty stuff.

A brand new Office Depot had just opened...

What do you do with a drunk-en sai-lor?
What do you do with a drunk-en sai-lor?
What do you do with a drunk-en sai-lor?
So ear-ly in the mor-ning!

Thus goes an old navy ditty from the glorious days of sails and brass cannons. I never learned WHY they had to do "something" with the drunken sailor. Couldn't you just let him lie where he dropped? Or perhaps the ship was sinking--I can see where you might feel obligated to DO something with one of your...

As the somewhat deranged bounty hunter in the television series, Firefly, said at the very end of one episode as he found himself in his space suit, alone, abandoned millions of kilometers from the nearest planet, station or ship: "Well. Here I am."

Here I am. Sixty-two years old. I swore I would never live this long. I never saw any reason why I would want to. But life happened, you know how that is. Or maybe you don't. You'll understand some day. Or you won't....

Life is full of incidents. Well, that goes without saying. But some of those incidents are rather special, even memorable. And some of those memorable incidents actually occur on holidays. And so it was this past Monday, Memorial Day of 2009.

This coming June will mark the end, for me and my wife Gwen, of the third year in our new home in League City, Texas. By the way, League City was on the 2007 list of the Hundred Best Small Towns in America. No fooling. And our modest little...