What could conceivably be more aggravatingly frustrating than to prepare to use your computer only to discover that your computer has no intention of co-operating? Yesterday afternoon my computer which I hold in the highest esteem, withheld its services. It resolutely ignored my efforts to wake it from an admittedly-deserved rest. It isn't that old, no more than four years, but it has obviously grown weary of my incessant demands of its services.

While the computer was on as it should be, the monitor was blank. And nothing I seemed to do to coax it to show some signs of [not sentient, but sentient-useful] life was to no avail. I checked the connections, the cable, the plugs. I changed the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor itself to another, and ... nothing. So last night, rather than engage in my usual blogging enterprise I read instead. It wasn't time wasted; I looked through and read most of the text of 'A Visual Dictionary of Herbs', thus adding to my knowledge of herbs with their culinary and medicinal properties.

And I also began reading Children in the Holocaust and World War II, their secret diaries; a riveting compilation of the hopes, fears and impressions of young teens writing of their Holocaust-related experiences, by Laurel Holliday. She gathered the diaries, observing that they represented courage and rebellion against the cruel fate these children faced, determined to give them the audience she felt they deserved.

Cruel fate was what, in an individual sense, hit a man who was driving his car on a main thoroughfare nearby where we live when he suffered a heart attack, and his car hit a main hydro installation of the type placed on the ground throughout the area, knocking out power to an estimated four thousand homes, ours among them. We were suddenly plunged, around ten in the evening, into total darkness about five days ago. We groped about to make our way the short distance to pick up a flashlight apiece. Soon afterward the electricity was restored.

In the following days we experienced a series of brief power outages, irritating but what can you do? In one instance the outage began at five and lasted until six, and that evening up until two in the morning brief spurts of power breaks occurred. Since then it appears all the damage to the power lines has been amended and reliability restored. Initially despite that we have a good-quality power bar for protection against surges my desktop wasn't happy at all with these 'unauthorized' shut-downs, though my husband's mini-laptop seemed unperturbed by comparison.

We thought we'd take my computer in for a diagnostic test that might determine what was wrong with the connections, and we'd do that some time today. But soon after we came down for breakfast my husband looked over at my computer desk in the family room and there was the computer and monitor, up and ready for use.