Hooray, hooray! It's the first

Oh, yeah, it's only the first of February.

But that's OK, because somehow January flew past! We, here in the banana belt of Michigan don't have the snow accumulation of the beleaguered east coast, or the (shudder) Dakotas. Even Minneapolis, where I have some descendants, has had months now with no place to put the snow they shovel.



Is there any frustration quite like "trying new tricks with the computer" frustration? My sister and I had an hour of grumbling as she tried to make Skype work.



I see you but I can't hear you. I hear you but I can't see you. Fiddle, fiddle. Lose the screen completely. Feedback screeching in your ears. Use the phone instead. All this and she has a guy in the house who works with computer systems all his working life.

We weren't using it for ourselves. Her daughter is living far away and they would love to be able to chat using Skype. It'll happen. Somebody will help.

I never expect to be able to make things work. My "Brotherbob" is my computer "vendor" and when he set up our last desktop computer he named it The Great Unknown. Aptly put. Thanks to my mom, I can touch type---after a fashion. She insisted that I take typing and bookkeeping, in spite of the fact that I knew I wanted to be a nurse. I didn't excel at it, but I don't have to look at the keyboard and type with two fingers, at least.

But doing anything with the computers had to be learned as an adult. And GoodGuy suggested that I play with an Apple computer he had 23 years ago. It didn't do much compared to what computers CAN do, if you have a clue what to do with them. But it kept me off the street corners. Kids wouldn't even believe those glowing green screens of the past.

They are amazing in the hands of the experts. I suppose. Probably.....