Dead Gremlins

I do not want to be depressed by the gap existing between my weakness and my ambition.

Ella Maillart
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That we are all capable of more than we do is a truism that almost anyone will agree to. It happens in everyone's life at some point, when we are pushed and shoved, or trip and fall into a situation over which we have no control, or so we think, that we find a strength, an intelligence and an ingenuity we didn't know we had. Those are the moments when we do things we can't do.

I have written about the elderly man I knew who came home to find his house ablaze and rushed into the flames to rescue his invalid wife. I think I wrote about the girl who was submerged for over 40 minutes in a raging river and when she was finally pulled out was taken dead to a hospital where she revived. You may remember the story of the man who had never flown an airplane but who took over the controls when the pilot suddenly passed out. He successfully landed the plane with no injury to the passangers.

From my own experiences I've told about lifting the back end of my totally dark and lifeless station wagon and hurling it several times to get it out of the middle of a super highway at night, about finding my way down off a mountain in the pitch dark and about going on to play a major second act role when I had only the first act to learn the lines.

I woke up last Saturday morning with a computer that had just about everything wrong with it that you can imagine. The only thing it did right was to turn on. I soon found that I had lost control of everything. I lost my blogs, your blogs, my dashboard, my Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin connections, my on line banking and credit card statements, all news and weather feeds, and what was most frightening, I had lost the Mail Waiting To Be Sent from the AOL Write Mail which contained, among other important things, the Summer Question and all of the 21 excellent answers. There were several other problems as well, most of them minor.

Between Saturday and now (Tuesday evening) I have spent about 10 hours on the phone with Verizon and AOL. There were very intelligent and helpful tech support people every call I made, but some of the problems were things they couldn't handle or didn't know how to approach. By Sunday evening I was a raging mad man, with my brains soaked in caffeine and nicotine.

On Monday still no one could tell me how to restore my dashboard. Without it I could not regain any of my blogs, which means I couldn't write on them or read them. For no reason and on no one's advice I decided to start a new blog, Vagabond Dump, (don't ask) and that gave me back the dashboard which, in turn, gave me back my blogs. I don't know yet what I will dump in Vagabond Dump. I won't dump you there, I promise, as long as you behave yourself.

Monday also brought a very nice woman from AOL who struggled for a long time but finally found the Mail Waiting To Be Sent file and restored it.

That left one major problem which was that I couldn't paste anything into my blog, as I will do with this semi articulate piece of self indulgence when I've finished it. The Vagabond Journeys simply would not accept anything copied from somewhere else.

I was just about to chuck the whole thing and go back to pen, paper and postage stamps when, Ah Ha !, intuition set in. I went crazy, going through my blog page, clicking on buttons that had nothing to do with the problem and one of them, I don't know which, worked.

Now I am able to cut, copy and paste, like we used to do in grammar school. And that means that I can continue to provide exhausting, verbose literary monsters for your reading "pleasure."

You're welcome.
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DB - The Restored Vagabond
Never give up.
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SUMMER QUESTION

Summer is moving along, people.

It's a long, hot, sticky summer, so here's a hot, sticky question for you.

Same sex marriage. Should it be legal or not? If so, why? If not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

21 interesting answers so far.

You have until the last day of summer, but don't dally.
I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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