#12 Staying focused in hell

Staying focused in hell

Strong title, I must admit.

If you have not done so, check out my last blog, I think it is numbered 11. I wrote that very late on a Wednesday morning, or some might say Tuesday night.. I went to bed thinking that when I blogged next time, I could try some retro blogs or something.

But Wednesday had different plans for me.

It was very windy Wednesday morning, and at about 8:30 I heard something break off and fall, our house is surrounded by a lot of trees, some very old, so I figured something might have hit our roof. I checked the side window of my bedroom, nothing there, then checked the front window and saw the cause.

A huge part of a pine tree had broken off and fallen into the street. The tree had broken from our neighbor’s yard and fallen across the street, and onto a small part of our yard. As I looked outside, I saw my brother already headed out there to try to clean up the mess off the street, as it could easily block any traffic coming down the street.

I quickly put some clothes on and rushed out to help him and we were able to move much of the debris out the street. The larger part actually blocked our neighbor’s driveway but we figured that we can’t move it, and would wait until he came by to help him. Three sets of hands are better than two. So we went back inside.

I came back in and decided, since I was up, I might as well try to blog or get online, but ran into a major problem. My computer would not work. I could not get it to boot up, trying everything from safe mode to debugging and everything in between. Nothing was working. Having no money to go to get it serviced, I had to try to figure it out on my own, and with moms computer not working, it was not easy at all.

After many attempts, I was now facing one last choice…system recovery.

For those of you that are partially familiar with computer lingo, this is a very desperate act. Computers can do a system restore, where you back up your computer a day or so or even longer, to a preset date to help get your computer back to a decent working point. But I could not do that, it was not working that way. To do a system recovery is to essentially erase everything on your computer, and revert it back to the day you bought it. This is extreme, and in doing so, you lose anything you added to the computer after you bought it. That means all my writing that I did not move to a usb or cd….probably about 1000 pages of original writing.

I had no choice, I didn’t have the money to get it serviced, and with me just starting the blog, I really needed to be consistent in order to build some readers and maybe some support down the road. So with a broken heart, I did system recovery.

After I finished, I tried to restart…and had worse problems. It would not start. Something about the NTLDR being compressed, and I could not get it to start. I cursed inside my heart thinking, “what the hell is next!”. After hours of trying to figure out what to do, I was broken. I lost my computer, and my ability to write.

Depressed, I went to my bedroom, closed the door and wanted to cry. My God, when does the persecution end, and when will I get a taste of those promised blessings? I left my window blinds open to see when our neighbors would come out to try to move that large tree in his driveway, and after awhile I saw him trying to move it himself. I quickly moved and told my brother, and we went out and helped him.

But when I came back in the house, I was miserable. So much work lost, for nothing. My depression started to grow, wondering what I could do. With no money, it might be weeks before mom could afford to take my computer to a shop to be fixed. That meant no blogging for awhile, and I could do nothing about it. Two computers in our house, and NEITHER works…well, technically we have 3 but nobody used that relic anyway.

Worse still, with my brother off work today, he wanted to watch all the “Lost” shows on the DVD, meaning I had no venues for entertainment. I don’t have a tv in my bedroom, and the computer was my only real venue of doing anything. Mom was in her room with the other tv, and the third tv was in my brother’s room; he was watching the “Lost” shows in the living room. I was quite literally boxed in with nothing to do.

But later mom told me I could watch her tv because she was going out, so I went in her room to stare at the tv. But it was then I figured, why not try to fix HER computer? We ordered the installation CD but wasn’t too sure how to do it, so I took the time, read the directions and tried to reinstall the cds to her computer. In about an hours time, I was done, and actually was successful in getting her computer back on line. Unfortunately, it took a system recovery, so she lost everything too, though not NEARLY as much as I did. Still, we were back with a working computer and could go online. I took the opportunity to check my email, then make a quick comment on the wordpress blog.

Some success, but I was still broken. I lost too much on my personal computer, and was depressed. I went to bed early, very early, and stayed in my bedroom all night. I woke up this morning with the idea that maybe I could use mom’s computer to find out how, if possible, to fix my own. As it turns out, mom was taking my brother to work, so I had the freedom to do that (mom would have allowed me to do so anyway, but I didn’t feel like answering too many questions about this or that).

But funny thing, just as they were about to leave, we get a phone call from a ministry that I had been tithing to in past months. They wanted to do a survey about some things, so I obliged and took the time. I answered a few questions about their show and things, and at the end she asked if she could pray for me about anything. I told her that normally I would gladly accept it, but lately my faith has been tested too severely, and at this moment, I just didn’t have the faith to believe in a prayer right now.

I said that because I have been praying for YEARS for my life to turn around, I have been praying for YEARS for some prosperity. I have been praying for YEARS for something to go in my favor, instead of me getting kicked in the mouth as often as I have had. To this date, as an ex felon, very little has gone my way, and somehow another 3 minutes talking about prayer would not change that. Sadly that is what I believed.

I have just been going through too much hell right now, and to pray meant I had to believe God would do something, not 99 years from now, but NOW. That, I did not believe.

The lady thanked me for being kind enough to help with the survey, and also for my honesty. After we finished, I then started to see if there was a way to save my computer, at least to get it working. I used mom’s computer to google some issues that my computer had, and actually found a solution. I rushed back to my personal computer, tried it out and BINGO, I got it to do a successful system recovery.

The good news was that it did recover my original installation package, so I was back at step one…the bad news, all my writings were gone. Bitter sweet success.

Just recently I went and checked my emails and answered those that had gotten in touch with me. And with it now basically working, I can at least blog. So here I am. With this computer now backed up to the original settings, I have a lot of things I need to do with it to get it back to where I had it, but to be honest I need a new one anyway. But until that day happens, I will try to keep blogging.

So why was it so important for me to blog? I mean, with all this hell going on, why bother writing for people with loved ones in prison? The easy solution would be to just say, “screw it, it ain’t working”. And believe me, it has happened more than once. But I am stupid enough to think that if I can keep hammering at this, sooner or later somebody is going to believe that I DO care about this genre, and willing to do what I can to help. I am foolish to believe if I can keep working on this, there then I can hopefully start getting support so I can contribute more, share more and maybe down the road earn some income doing this, while helping others. I lost a LOT of my older blogs, but I still have many that I had saved in the past, hopefully those will come into service, and I will likely post up a number of retro blogs to help some of you out there.

So for what it’s worth, I am still here. I REALLY need a new computer, maybe in time I can earn one. Until then….