There is some suggestion that someone sent  some fiery little e-bomb into my computer, perhaps the Russians are annoyed with me. Yesterday my computer crashed and after seven hours or so on the phone with Apple tech support (it was getting surreal, they were going deeper and deeper into my computer with more and more chaos) I bailed out and took my computer to a friendly place nearby.

The computer, which is almost new, kept freezing and crashing and finally flamed out completely.

I think it had a nervous breakdown from all of my gassing on.

I did back up the computer just yesterday, blessedly but the techs did something called partitioning to my hard drive and it is partitioned nearly into oblivion. I love Apple, but sometimes they try a little too hard.

So everything is an opportunity, and everything happens for a reason. I will not whine or complain or speak poorly of my life, which is quite fine. I will have some time to work on my spiritual life today, walk with the dogs, meditate, read. All my photos are unavailable to me, hopefully only briefly (they were stored in an external drive, but that seems to be in trouble also), but here, on Maria’s old laptop, which I am using to post this message, was a photo of Lulu I took earlier this week. Don’t know how that happened.

I hope to be back fully online tomorrow, or maybe will be trying to get a new computer going. You haven’t heard the last of me, but in the meantime, you cannot do better than follow Maria’s wonderful words and images coming from Kolkata, better than anything I could write or post. We always did work as a team, even 8,000 miles apart. More later tonight.

It is unnerving but healthy when life is upended. My whole creative life is in that machine, including the first five chapters of my new book, and my creative idyll is not off to the greatest start. When it comes, I will appreciate it all the more, but for today, I might try and plow through the snow to get to my meditation bench. Might be a good place to go if I can get there.

Thanks for your loyalty and your patience. It is always healthy to get off of these devices for a bit.