OMG! I'm BACK! It's been so very long. It's so surreal to actually be typing at home.

I guess it's best to begin at the beginning...three weeks ago. It was early on a Sunday morning, and the computer had been cranking along, acting sorta weird, but generally just being it's geriatric self. I decided to do a little house cleaning by deleting some files...you know, just your usual crap when you're trying to ignore dirty dishes and clean clothes piled to the ceiling on the dryer and pretend you're not actually going to surf the internet...just do a little much needed maintenance...

OPERATING SYSTEM ERROR

These are words you never want to see. I probably shouldn't even be TYPING them. As a matter of fact, stop reading them NOW.

THOSE words flashed around, and the screen went blank.

Remember the Sex and the City episode with the "Sad MAC...Sad MAC?" And then dumba$$ Aiden did the control+alt+delete to wipe out everything on Carrie's hard drive? That's pretty much how it went over here, except I was dumba$$ Aiden AND Carrie (OK, my daughter was an innocent in all this, she might be Carrie).

When it happened, I did all sort of crazy crap...restart, restart, restart. I couldn't actually reBOOT, as Windows wouldn't even give me a wink. I was out in the cold dark world of blank black screen with the occasional hopeful glimmer of blank blue screen. Staring, staring, staring. Thinking, thinking, thinking. More staring.

I scrounged around in the decrepit funeral home computer desk and in some freakish alignment of the stars FOUND the operating system disk. "Damn, I am GOOD," I smirked at the blank black screen.

Insert disk.

Restart.

Random commands.

Then the computer became Hal and started yelling at me to do this and do that and asking me funky questions about where everything was...all in that depressing MS DOS mode, like I wasn't already depressed enough that I have to stare at these no-font lines of crap telling me to type in some crazy prompt.

"If you're so freaking smart, YOU type the damned command you MF-ing #*%^@*# computer!!"

Computers can be such ill-mannered creeps sometimes. They act so proud of themselves with their fancy backslashes and blabbering on about C drives and their evil return key BEEP. Even when they're sick and dying, they're total bitches.

So, what did I do at that point? I went into the bedroom, woke up my daughter, gave her the sad news and...I cannot believe I'm telling you this...cried. Tears started flowing out completely unrestrained. Suddenly, everything that was wrong in my life (my sad love life, depressing finances, the fact that I missed the last episode of Project Runway) all came to settle upon the shoulders of this now expired computer.

We scrambled around and got this 1990s band-aid for a couple of weeks (don't even ask), and then...incredibly...this man came to our rescue. Can you believe it? He's a geologist, yoga teacher AND computer whiz. (I couldn't make this stuff up, people!)

Anyway, I just wanted to give a big shout out to Tim for helping me to get cranked up to posting again. BTW, if you're interested, True North Yoga is sponsoring an Introduction to Power Flow Yoga class Saturday, December 15 starting at 9 a.m. There are just a few openings left for the class. Check out www.truenorthyoga.com for more info.

Namaste!