And so it came to pass a few days ago that I have begun that inexonerable slide toward old age. Sure, I’ve had a tremendous amount of white hair in my twenties (which I blame on all those emergency room visits for my kids). Those laugh lines around my eyes appeared in my late teens, yep hated sunglasses  and loved the outdoors. As for pieces breaking down and not working like when I was younger, well, I’ve been a mutant all my life things never worked for me like they worked for others.

And I’d made peace with it.

I didn’t even lie about my age (mostly because I’ve earned every D@mn minute!)

But then the weekend came and after a marathon job of painting the kid’s living room, I went to work on the computer. For some reason, the operating system didn’t come on but remained solely in the reboot screen.

So I rebooted.

And rebooted.

I wiped the harddrive. Twice.

Then my husband tried it. Twice.

We went through all the screens, all the set-ups and kept getting that stupid screen. Given the amount of time I spent waiting, I started scraping the freckles of paint off keyboard, working from the bottom up and was nearly halfway done when our son rose at the crack of 2pm.

Now #1 son (I have only one and so he says such a designation is meaningless) is a computer networking major in college. Hubby called in #1 son to check. #1 son rebooted twice then wiped the hard drive.

Same result (insanity runs in the family or we don’t listen when others speak about what they’ve already done).  #1 son says he has homework and will think about it later.

Glowering at the computer didn’t make it work so we shut it down.

Ten minutes later, #1 son comes out of his bedroom, sits down at the computer, scrapes the paint on the keyboard then turns on the computer.

Same result.

Then he shuts it down and pulls out the keyboard and tries again. The frickin’ windows logo pops up. Seems a spot of paint has glued down the F11 key.

Doh! If only I’d started at the top of the keyboard instead of the bottom I could have saved myself a lot of aggravation. Of course, covering the stupid computer would have prevented it in the first place. Still, the path into old age suddenly got a little steeper.