Slow as molasses in winter

On the rusted T-bars of the old clothesline in the back yard outside my bedroom window, snow piles up and up: four inches now and soon five and six and even more from the looks of the snow coming down like a heavenly shaker with an endless supply of salt raining down, caught in the gravitational pull of winter. The sky is a dirty white and a mist of dirtier white streams from the chimney of the yellow brick building farther down the alley. A fuzzy tracery of winter bared trees appears and disappears through the fog of lowering clouds and chimney smoke. The more familiar solid shapes of telephone and utility poles are losing substance and depth. And the snow keeps falling.

My laptop is running like pudding through a fine-meshed sieve because I picked up a virus yesterday when I downloaded a program from Gamevance yesterday. Gamevance is a computer gaming site with malware and adware and spybots that latch onto the back door to deposit leeches sucking the RAM and energy from my usually fast running computer. I spent most of a snowy yesterday from mid morning to 7 p.m. clearing off the splattered cybergoop and my computer still isn't back to normal. I need to find my flash drive so I can save important files, like articles and books in progress, and do a complete install, but I hope I won't have to go that far and I can get the rest of the goop to vacate the premises whether they want to or not. This is my computer and I won't tolerate intruders.

All my carefulness about what I do and don't download and now I have been done in by a need for the mental stimulation of games. One more thing to zap off my list of things to do. Or I could buy a new computer, transfer all my data, and then clean this one off. If only I could afford that. And it's Monday.