THE INVASION IS OVER, WE WON

Don't know if my public has noticed, but I haven't posted anything for the past week. The reason is that we had housepests, Mary and her two kids. It was fun, but a definite distraction from blogging. We went to a lot of fast food joints, to a movie, to the mall, to Kohl's, to Wally World, to the museum, and hiking at Wildcat Bluff.

Dan has just got his driving license so he took the wheel for a lot of this. Linda is not old enough to drive yet, so she enjoyed listening to her Mom hector him about his technique. "Watch out for that car! That light is about to change! You're going too fast! Get in the other lane! Should you be driving with your hands shaking like that?" (The shaking was an obvious attempt to control the urge to strangle someone.)

My only suggestion was that he might fit into our older neighborhood better if he drove at 20 mph with his left blinker on.

Linda's special talents, aside from keen observation of mother-son conflict, include playing complicated video games, putting together 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, and winning at Spider solitaire on my computer. She taught me Spider but I have not advanced beyond Hopeless Amateur Level. Oh yes, another talent is her ability to keep track of her Mom's weight and what is on her diet, and inform her what she ought not to be eating. She has certain popularity issues within her family.

While they were here, Mary suggested rearranging the "Favorites" file on my computer. I had about three dozen favorite websites scattered higgledy-piggledy in a list, and she showed me I could put them into logical folders such as blogs, e-mags, politics, military, business, misc., etc. Now all I have to do is to remember whether Little Green Footballs was put under blogs or politics, and open the right folder.

HOWEVER--almost immediately after she finished improving my computer like that, we had the Onslaught of the Killer Pop-Ups. Just as soon as I would swat one down, another would pop up and take its place. I find it hard to believe that, as she insists, organizing my favorites has nothing to do with this. I am sure if I could just remember exactly how my old Favorites file was organized (or, more accurately, disorganized), putting them back that way would get rid of the pop-ups.

They are back in Missouri now, and I miss them. Now, if I could just fix my Favorites . . . but maybe I'll give Spider another try, I think I'm really catching on now.