ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE THE DAWN:

Folks, I'm pleased to say that my iMac is proving itself to be the magical thing I had hoped it would be. There are a lot of things I've yet to learn, but the basic machine is working like a charm. It is all do to the technological abilities of the modern teen. Hire a teen to help when you are working on getting to know how to operate your new computer. I've seen my grandchildren clicking a mouse on a computer game at the age of ONE... they have never known a world without a computer in their home.

So... when everything else failed, I asked a friend who had an Apple computer if her teenaged son was available, and he came over last Saturday and got this computer on track. What was good about this is EVEN he had problems. Yeah... it wasn't just me! There was a definite problem between Lexmark and the iMac OS X that I just purchased, and he managed to find a download from Apple that took care of the problem. As for the email, we just cancelled the free "mac.com" email thing for a month thing that I didn't need, and just have the local carrier's email on the iMac email program. There was probably more to it than that, but it's working well.

Sorry if I almost gave up in dismay, but even though my father was an electrician, I did not inherit any of his abilities in working with anything requiring more than having to plug in a plug and flip a switch. When my son August was in the 5th grade, I read one of the books he was reading. It was about Thomas Edison. As a young man when he was first experimenting with electricity, he asked Alexander Graham Bell how electricity worked. Bell answered him thus: "If you pull the tail of a donkey it will bray at the other end." Aha, I thought, even the experts don't know exactly how it works... they just know how to work with it. This fifteen year old young man who came into my home and sat here straightening out my problems didn't have to know how this all came about... that we can compute now almost as easily as we could talk on the phone... he just knows how to work with the computer to make it happen.

The following should read "Grandma...etc..."

more cat pictures

I thought about this. What if we first had to understand HOW with every electronic item worked before we could use it. How does my voice go over the telephone lines?... worse yet, how the heck does it go out over the wireless airways to some relay tower or satellite from one's cell phone to another phone?... And gets to just the one person's phone out of the billions of telephones that are out there?

How does the electricity come into the toaster to heat make toast out of a slice of bread?

And how does a picture get carried from a television station into that TV set we couch potatoes watch??

The world was mysterious enough from its beginnings, and since man began inventing, and realizing how to capture the power of electricity and radio waves, it has become mind boggling.

I'm no longer going to think I have to understand the computer in order to use it... I'm just going to learn how to take advantage of it's possibilities, and it seems like it's possibilities are endless.

WHAT A WORLD!