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I am a warrior of words. Yes, I fight them, cut them, make them bleed, and then put them into pretty paragraphs of purple paisley prose. Just like that.

But I also have a real life that pushes me and pulls me, makes me bleed, and do the thistly things that thoroughly threaten to make me poor and exhausted and eventually dead.

Yes, yesterday I had jury duty. In Denton.

I had to drive thirty miles on Interstate 35 only to get lost in downtown Denton looking for the county courthouse amidst construction barriers, curly-cue streets, and a GPS app on my phone that quit working just when I needed it most.

So, I finally find the proper place, find a parking space, stand in a long line to enter the building as the cold wind blew, and then negotiate a thorough near-strip-search security scan to get into that room full of potential jurors who fill all the seats and more. I felt a bit diabetically challenged, a little bit woozy. And then a woman behind me hits the floor from high blood pressure and has to be taken out by ambulance. We all have to wait for a longer time because of it, getting woozier all the while.

About 350 potential jurors for four jury pools that would need about 100 people to pick from. Of those, 48 would actually hear a case. So, all I had to do was sit and wait to find out that I was not picked. And I was released to go home, having earned six dollars for the day. Of course, they asked me if I wanted to donate it to a court-related charity. I did not. Dang! I earned that money!

And how, exactly, am I claiming to be a warrior of words with this essay? By taking this thistly experience and turning it into a blog post. A warrior fights his wars with the weapons he knows best.

My computer was hacked last week. I clicked on a link from a Russian I didn’t know well on Twitter. It was supposedly a YouTube video link in response to my recent YouTube videos. But it was a wicked, warty virus from the sleazy side of Computertown. It forced me to log into my Google Chrome account again as it downloaded spyware to capture my password. Once logged into my Google account, they could look at all my saved passwords. The potential for disaster was clear. I did not know how much control they had over my computer at the time, or what they were actually doing. So, I used my McAfee security program that I bought as a result of the previous hack by a disreputable security company to clean away the spyware and trackers. I then got a McAfee technician to remotely go in and find any lingering Trojan Horse viruses and eliminate them. It turned out that I had already eliminated all bugs with my initial cleaning. All that remained was to solve the revealed password problem. Which wasn’t hard. All my credit card accounts are closed due to bankruptcy. Those passwords were all useless to the stooges who were looking at them. I had a bank card password on the list, but it was the password previous to the current one. I changed it and stopped saving it on Google the last time I was hacked. There were a few other passwords to change, but there was no way for them to steal anything from any of those unless they want to pretend to be me on the nudist website I wrote blog posts for, though that is not linked to any possible payments or funds. I will know if they decide to post things for me. And who knows? Maybe they will join the nudist community online. I do know some Russian nudists from Twitter.

Hopefully, that puts an end to my bout of Russian computer flu. I hope you are taking precautions too. Google Chrome is NOT a secure place to store passwords. I learned that the hard way. Take the easy way and learn from my mistake, because the fakers will get you too eventually, and you don’t deserve to lose any money to criminals.

https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/04/04/comic-strips-can-make-me-cry/

This old word-wizard is having a spot of trouble with his magical tools. More than just the usual cussing at crazy computer antics too.

I like to move the cursor as I write with the mouse pad on the keyboard, rather than the actual mouse. And this preference often leads to unintended zooms and shrinks when my thumbs stray too close to the hyper-sensitive zoom spots on the edges of the pad.

My alternative theory is that the laptop became both sentient and crazy because I dropped it on its micro-chipped little head one two many times. It now likes to mess with me constantly because the tiny computer fairies that move its thoughts around inside its dented brain are vindictive and vengeful.

So, yesterday it got way worse. Some Russian hacker sent me a link in the messages section of Twitter. I clearly saw that supposed YouTube video link was fake with the word “account” embedded in it. But the fairies took over the mouse pad and clicked on the evil little bugger without me even touching it again.

To make a long story short, so to speak, my computer is now sick with Russian computer flu again, and my anti-virus program is locked in the 26th hour of a life-or-death struggle.

I swear, of course, that this is all true just as I said it. And hopefully I come through it with all my passwords still secret. I am too old to be doing wizard war via computer. It makes me long for the old days of wands and potions. I had to write this post on my phone today.