It really should be easier. . .

I have a confession to make. I'm a computer moron. I'm married to a man who is a computer whiz, and who expects me to understand everything through some sort of osmosis. You'd think, after all these years, he'd realize that wasn't going to happen. However, I digress. . .

All I wanted to do this morning was come over here and blog; I have this site bookmarked, I had an idea of what I wanted to talk about, and I knew I wanted to upload a picture of my new cover. It should be a fairly simple process, shouldn't it? (note the key words there - *should be*) It wasn't. It took me the better part of an hour just to get here, and not because the Blogger site was giving me problems, but because everything else seemed to be working against me.

My laptop (God bless it) is not the quickest horse in the race. On a good day, it takes almost two minutes for Internet Explorer to finally load in the morning, but I chalk that up to the fact that the poor computer has not had coffee, and it's feeling a little arthritic, so while it's warming up and loading, I reorganize my pens into colour (again), rearrange my bulletin board of faces, and scribble down my list of to-do's before I forget all of it. Once I get the internet up, I need to hook onto Sirius country radio (channel 61) - there's another couple minutes. It was all going pretty well so far. Then I went directly to my Tote Bags bookmark and tried to sign in.

Now I ask you - how is a computer moron supposed to have any idea what the heck cookies and caches are? In my world, cookies are made by Mr. Christie and cash is something there is never enough of. Yet somehow, these things are blocking me from signing in. Very dutifully, I follow the helpful links that try to explain how to clear the cache and/or the cookies from my computer. And in case you're wondering, yes, I tipped my laptop to the side to shake out any cookie crumbs that may have been the problem to start with. :)

I should probably mention here, that this laptop does not like it when I try to open more than one internet window at a time. In fact, it has a bit of a hissy if I have Word and the internet opened at the same time. It's an excruciatingly painful experience. But there I was this morning with (count 'em) THREE internet windows open so I could go from one to the other while reading instructions and trying to empty things I had no idea even existed. It worked, apparently I've bleached Mr. Christie out of my system, and we're good to go again.

With Clint Black singing me through it, I log in and click on the little doo-dicker thing to upload my new cover. Wait wait wait wait. 84 seconds later (I kid you not!), the little window thing opens. I go through the process of trying to load the cover from the files on my computer, only to have it come out almost black in the preview. This struck me as particularly creepy because the book is called The Devil's Daughter, and while the paranormal/devil element is very light in the book, it's still about the devil, and its cover was coming out black. You have to agree - that's a little creepy. But I would not be put off. Somewhere I had an account with one of those online photo places, and I knew there was a perfectly good version of the cover there. But what the heck was the name of the website?

I won't bore you with all the details, but suffice it to say, it took several more minutes (and I mean SEVERAL) to discover it was PhotoBucket, and of course I did not remember my password, so it was yet more minutes to go through the retrieval process so I could sign in. Finally, the planets aligned, Tim McGraw finished singing about refried dreams and there was my cover.



Isn't it lovely? The Devil's Daughter will be released in April, so I'm hip-deep in copy edits right now, and using this picture as inspiration to work through them.

I have completely forgotten what I originally set out to blog about this morning, so I will leave you with these questions. Are any of you closet computer morons too? Is there anything about your computer you absolutely love? Or anything you can't stand? Do you and your computer have a love/hate relationship as I do with mine? And do you have a routine you go through with your computer (like waiting for Sirius to load)? Please tell me I'm not the only computer moron out there. . . .