Yesterday's passing was just one -- and the worst -- in a series of unsettling, weird and unusal events that began the day before. None of which (lost wallet, giant fax report forcing papers all over the floor, fountaining toilet, etc.) I found worth mentioning because I was feeling so upset over sj's death.

The times are still out of joint, however. This morning I turned on my old, reliable, never-a-problem computer and it gave me a funky error message and the Blue Screen of Death. I shut it down and rebooted it and it booted OK, but the keyboard wasn't active -- accessing, I would guess, an address that's invalid somehow, or maybe one of the memory chips is bad.

Anyhow, I ran Norton Utilities and got the computer working fine -- and my IP program had crashed. Somehow, somewhere, all the telephone access numbers had gone to the great Memory Sink in the Sky. The numbers are available online, says the help file. Yeah. Right.

Since I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, and since I know that if you haven't had a problem with your computer or a program, it's just that you haven't waited long enough, I have a notebook full of stuff like help numbers, old passwords, etc.

Where's the notebook? Aye, there's the rub. Is it at work? Bit of a panic, there, but no, it was in my case. Numbers found, re-entered in the appropriate spaces, and here I am.

And it's only 7 a.m. Plenty of time for more bizarre stuff to cross my path. Should make for an interesting day--I'm off to a Book Festival at UCLA. With cash, although if you've known me for a minute (well, a minute-and-a-half) you know that my having cash and seeing books...there's the slippery slope to something.