I am heartsick. It happened two days ago and the devastation I'm experiencing has kept me too agonized to write about it until now.

Mel is dead.

My beloved PC.

Now, I've had nothing but trouble out of that damnable thing for the last year. It seizes up at every opportunity and without warning or provocation, he has lost the same image file three times (though I suspect hubby had a little something to do with that), and he refuses to work with several small downloads that run through the systems of younger PCs like dookie through a goose. He has visited the PC doctor three of our times since Sir Lawrence and I have been married, which gives him an average of 1 to 1.3 visits per year and he was rapidly approaching tarpit age but he was mine and I loved him. I learned most of what I know about computers and the internet while playing with Mel. Now he's gone.

This latest tragedy was caused by a faulty mouse.

Larry bought me this fancy new mouse that has a light rather than a tracking ball and when I went to plug it into my modem it didn't fit. So I just plugged the regular mouse back in and it worked. For about ten minutes. Then it too locked up.

It lets me guide the cursor up and down but in no other direction. I tried to fix it and so did Larry, who even went to the trouble of uninstalling and reinstalling it just to get it to work. No luck.

With everything else that's happened with Mel recently, I think Larry is inclined to give up and put him out to PC pasture. I'd be inclined to agree if I had something else. Like a Mac, which I wanted anyway and was waiting until Mel died to look into getting one. But, as Larry has so often reminded me in the last few months, the severance money he got when the last company he worked for was bought out is now gone. We paid off myriad bills, two credit cards and two cars with it and now there is no more.

So a new PC is out.

(insert expletive here)

That means I have to try to do everything with Larry's PC and I've lost all of the images I had stored on Mel. I also lost the written material I had, which means the loss of the three books I had begun to write but never had time to finish.

It's probably not worth it to take Mel back to the PC doctor (again) so the guys can do a short but expensive repair job (again) and wait for Mel to die, crash or otherwise seize up (again).

This really restricts what I can do because although Larry lets me maintain an image file on his PC to house the graphics for my designs he doesn't want me downloading anything else. I was lucky to talk him into letting me put AIM on this thing and he had to take a day to think about that.

It could be worse, I know this but it doesn't make me feel better. If he can be somehow miraculously reanimated, every time he dies and is fixed I lose an important file and have to start over.

This is another one of those things that shouldn't be that big a deal, yet is. I'll miss having a computer I could do anything I wanted with. I'll miss my image files. And I'll most certainly miss my written material.

I miss my PC already.