You can’t fool me with that gadgetry. Computers run on gremlins, or leprechauns, and every once in a while that mischievous need of theirs comes to the surface, and you are so screwed.
Lucky for me, it was only a minor event this time. I’m hoping my personal gremlin takes most of its obnoxious moods out on anyone else trying to use my computer, and gives me a break. I’m not quite to the point of leaving a saucer of milk in front of the hard drive, but almost.
Last night, between midnight and 2 a.m. (further evidence of the mystical factor!) I tried to open Chapter 19 to edit, and it crashed my word processor. I was patient, I tinkered, I went at it from a few different directions, and eventually I retrieved my file. But it was all full of gunk, so I went through and fixed it. You know, the symbol for every space, the gibberish for the word wraps, all that stuff. It did take me upwards of two hours, but it would have taken longer to type from hard-copy, so I did it. Only to figure out, as I hit the last paragraph–no, I’m not kidding, it didn’t hit me before, I must have been too tired–on the last paragraph I figured out that Chapter 19 was the chapter I discovered missing last week, and typed into WordPerfect 10 from the hardcopy! Dratted gremlins…
But this morning my leprechaun was somewhat kind. He let the munchkin play for a little while, then froze her game. One after another, they kept freezing, till she decided she’d rather just go play outside. Mommy’s turn!