Off the Record

Jesse and I learned a valuable lesson this week. A four-year-old + chocolate milk + a computer = crash and panic. On Tuesday, Mia took her cup of chocolate milk with her while she played on the computer. I don't know exactly how it happened, but the next thing I knew, she was crying and covered in milk, as was the keyboard and printer. I cleaned her up, grounded her from the computer, and cleaned off the keyboard and printer as well as I could. No serious damage seemed to have occurred. I blogged Tuesday's entry and was in the process of doing some family tree research when I realized that I couldn't type any t's. Or r's. Or anything on the keyboard Q-Y. I shook it upside down to clean it out again to no avail. I restarted the computer thinking that would help, but unfortunately our password to log on has both a t and an r. I shut down the computer and called Jesse to ask him to pick up a new keyboard on the way home from work. He switched keyboards when he got home and found a bigger mess under the printer (oops!) which entailed a great deal of shifting the CPU about to mop up. When he was done and tried to restart the computer, it wouldn't boot up. Nothing he tried would get it to boot, and he couldn't even get into safe mode. He took the hard drive over to his parents' house, and it wouldn't boot up there either. It appeared that our hard drive was fried. We were both tense and started to take it out on each other, but then we prayed about it together, Mia joined in. The drive has all of his schoolwork, our family pictures, genealogy info, my novel and other writings, plus hundreds of music files, not to mention email addresses.

Wednesday afternoon when he got home from work he tried hooking up Mom's old computer up to our drive (we have her computer here to clean off her pics and put them on her new puter). It didn't work. He tried switching things around and was finally able to run a diagnostics on it without actually accessing any of the files. As a last resort he put the hard drive back into our computer and started it up. It booted up quickly with no problems at all. There is no doubt in our minds that God fixed our computer. It certainly wasn't fixed by any of our doings. Thank You God!

Off the Record by Elizabeth White is the story of Laurel Kincaide, a young Southern lawyer who has decided to run for Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice. Just as she announces her candidacy, she sees journalist Cole McGaughan, the one man who could bring her campaign to a quick end with secrets about their shared past he holds in his hand. Laurel's best friend and campaign manager, who is unaware of their past, asks Cole to follow Laurel through election day for a story that could help them both: his with his newspaper career and Laurel to win a seat on the court. Things are complicated by Cole's friendship with private detective Hogan who has been hired by Laurel's opponent Field. White does a wonderful job of creating the Kincaide family with its delightfully twisted history and members. Laurel is trying to live out her faith during her candidacy, and she struggles to believe that Cole has had a change of heart and faith since they last met. I really enjoyed reading about Cole's faith. White portrayed it in an intimate way that struck home with me. Cole spoke to his Lord often as a good friend and loved son. At one point he runs through his options to calm down: cold shower, shot of alcohol, etc before realizing that what he needed was to talk to God, and it brought peace to his soul. Cole's relationship with God has helped my own grow in the same way. The book ends the way you would expect, but the twists and bumps on the way are worth the ride.

I've totally fallen in love with Shelfari. The list on the side is no longer books on my to read list; I'm trying to list all of the books I've read in my adult life, or at least the last ten years. It's extremely addictive, plus I can post my reviews there as well.