Hi dear friends and everyone else reading this,

I've been absent for the last two days, because my computer did a number on me.

I woke up friday morning, wanting to chat with a dear friend of mine (pre-arranged actually) and went and pressed the "on" switch on my computer.

Black screen.

DVD drive sounding like it really couldn't get going.

Delayed "ok" beeps.

Ooooh-kaayyyyyyy, something was not right here, so I turned the thing off, waited five minutes, then tried again. Same result, yay!

Tried a few times, but to no avail. Sent an SMS to my real-life friend (she knew my chat friend and could contact him through her computer) and asked her to give my mate a heads-up, which she did.

After work, I phoned my younger brother and told him the deal – we both suspected a run-down power supply, but in any event, he and my older brother would come to my place the next day (saturday that is – just in case some of you are having problems with short-term memory and general concentration). They were supposed to come that day anyway, because we had arranged to watch a movie and have dinner together.

So, my brothers looked at the computer (I'm not so good with hardware problems, nor the more complex software issues) and did some tests that made things a little better, but still didn't enable me to go online and write to all my dear anxietytribe friends (couldn't even get far enough to start my operating system).

So we watched the movie, cooked the dinner afterwards, and then we tried some more things. My younger brother then disassembled the interior of my computer and put it back in, minus a few non-critical components…and then it worked!

So far, the problem seems to be a faulty (but luckily non-critical) power cable and possibly a single, non-critical hardware piece. The important thing is that I can now use my operating system (Windows) and go online.

I won't be able to run all the duty-heavy computer games or other graphics intensive programs, but then, I don't need them as badly as I once did, so all is well.

So, if any of you were wondering: "Why isn't Phobos responding to my carefully written guestbook comment? Did I say something wrong? Doesn't he like me anymore?", now you know that I just couldn't get online – oh, I could go to the library, but I don't like to write about personal stuff in a public place, where people could look me over the shoulder.

So, in the future, if I take longer than a day to respond to something you wrote to me, try and check up on my general activity – if all my latest comments are days old, it's a good bet I'm absent from my computer (or my computer is "absent" from me).

Oh yes, and there ARE cases where I'm not sure how to respond appropriately, or where I simply forget because there are many other things that I need to deal with.

I'm just mentioning all this to give you all some ammunition to throw at negative, anxiety-provoking thoughts you might get in relation to what I do here and/or do NOT do here.

Hope everyone's all right – I know I'm certainly feeling better now that I can communicate again 🙂