But another cause was the reason. Julia called to me, smiling, "Get a magnifying glass and look at the bottom of this mouse!" It had a transparent bottom. The magnified view revealed... CRUMBS! Yes, my sloppy eating at the computer resulted in a crummy mouse!

I felt somewhat chagrined. I dumped the icky, sticky mouse pad, and began a frenzy of cleaning while waiting for Julia to get ready.

When we got back from Staples, after making sure the new mouse worked right, I continued cleaning. I cleared off the clutter from the table behind me, I vaccuumed most of the floor. I dusted a few shelves. I even cleaned some of the blinds. By this time I grew weary, and anyone can tell when I quit, for the cleaned part is so much whiter than the dusty parts.

But I cleaned! It is a rare, rare thing, I sadly tell you.

While Julia was checking out the computer earlier, she managed to install a new browser despite the bad mouse. Opera seems to work pretty well. What I like best about it is when I 'view source', I get editable text in wordpad. Firefox only shows you the text, which requires many extra steps. With Firefox, if you're going to work on the page, you have to first call up notepad, and then hunt for your page from within notepad. Also, I like that the various browser windows are indexed at the top, within the browser window, instead of at the bottom. I often have so many windows open, I can hardly tell what they all are, they get so shortened. But now things are much neater.