You can’t tell from reading this that it’s being written the old-fashioned way, with a pen on a lined notebook page. It’s only the second one being written this way since I started scribing — or scribbling — these weekly efforts.
The first was several years ago when I was imitating Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, James Joyce and others, sitting at a table in a sidewalk café on the Left Bank of the Seine River, not more than 50 meters from the most famous bookstore in the world, Shakespeare and Company, an experience that turned me into an unabashed and unashamed Francophile, a condition which has not diminished over the years.
But I’m digressing before I’ve even started explaining the first sentence. It started this way: I was visiting a website that started “breaking up,” when an image appeared on the screen, purportedly from AVG (a trusted virus protector) telling me to click in the indicated box to get things cleared up. I did, and that was a mistake!
What it was, was a virus, “CryptoWall,” apparently well known to geeks — that masquerades as AVG, but definitely is not. Its method of operation is to sneak into your computer, clean it out completely, and then offer you an opportunity to retrieve it — for a ransom. This ransom, I’m told, is in the $300 to $500 range. I decided to mourn the loss and take the computer to a local business that deals in cleaning up such messes.
Because I was still operating with the Windows XP system, which is no longer supported by Microsoft, its first advice was to get a new computer. This was the advice I followed, after first asking them to do what they could to clean up the old one.
Anyway, my daughter-in-law, Lanita, took pity on me and started to search for something inexpensive and simple enough for me to understand. She found a used one “on line” at a computer store in Olympia, which is what I’m using at this moment to transfer my scribbled words into computerized ones.
If only I knew how to operate it!
I started this process last night, but this (Tuesday) morning I can’t find what I had done (and thought I had saved) anywhere on this computer. After I’ve finished transcribing my written words, at least I know how to click on “print” before I try anything fancy.
It’s been an up and down weekend for me. Before I blew my stack over the initial problem, I headed for the grocery store to cool off. On the way, I spotted a yard sale sign that directed me to a mobile home in a local “park.” I didn’t buy anything, but noticed a For Sale sign on the home itself. The asking price was reasonable.
The upshot is that I asked my son, Matthew, a retired building inspector for the city of Seattle, to take a look at it. He did, he approved, I made a counter-offer for cash, the owners accepted, and, by not paying rent for my apartment, I’ll be able to save a few hundred dollars a month, (useful when you’re living on Social Security) which I’ll use to replenish my Rainy Day account, from which the money is coming to start all this.
Talk about a weekend of highs and lows! I’ve just lived through one.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
