Miriam reminds me that I am a slave to a machine. But I knew that. I love the Internet, the world’s largest library, hands down. But I cannot even pay my bills without this computer. I stopping buying checks a long time ago to do electronic banking. I can use the credit cards, of course, but I don’t even have the creditors’ addresses, except on the hard drive. And some of them, like the electric bill, for instance, cannot be paid with a credit card.
That’s government for you. Ask not what they can do for you, but what you can do for them. Meanwhile this machine is starting to slow down. My browsers are freezing too often lately for it to be an accident. It’s the trash-can syndrome, I believe, bcause it’s happened before. When we discard stuff, it doesn’t fly away into the ether. It just piles up in the hard drive. Now the little meter thingy claims I have beaucoup space left on it, but I wonder. There’s the slow down and the crashes. Something must be up. Slave that I am, I must figure it out.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Clean up and defragment, be my advice. But backup everything!
I’ll do the former. As for the latter, I only backup the stuff I really want to keep, the rest can implode for all I care.