Father's Day. The Windows 7 Black Screen.

My entries are probably going to be less frequent from now on.  I need to make the entry, put it away for 24 hours, and then decide if I should post it.

My Sunday English Corner took place on Father's Day. With my father having only died three weeks earlier, I talked about Father's day briefly. I wouldn't have mentioned that my father had died to the students, but there was a female student who I had happened, earlier this year,  to talk to a few weeks after her father died. Stupidly, as I went around the class asking students if they were doing something for their fathers and pointed to her. She told me that it was her first Father's Day without her father, and so I told her that my father had just died especially because I felt stupid for having asked her the question which I should have known not to. Why was she attending that particular English Corner on that particular day? Why do I think her being there eerily coincidental?

With my Dad having passed away, I can think of Father's Day as being a day for me. Tony gave me a cake, compelled by Mom of course, but the stark reality of being the adult and not a child really struck me at that moment.

I have posted more photos to the page dedicated to my father.

I saw nine old men sitting together in the back of an electric bike & wagon. I wish I could have taken a photo.

Trouble with my laptop: after logging into Windows 7, I got nothing but a black screen and cursor. For a while, I thought I was doomed. I was going to lose all the photos I had taken on my trip to Canada. Talking to the I.T. Person at work, he told me that he was going to have to go to a shop for repairs. Talking to the other teachers, I was told stories of how the black screen meant everything on the hard drive being lost or only being recovered for a pretty penny. But I persisted and I read on the Internet that I could access my drives by pressing the shift button five times when the black screen displayed. This five-shift procedure was originally intended to be used when the keyboard had sticky keys. But the menu that appears does let my get into the drives. Accessing the drives, I found I could access photos, watch videos, and use all the programs not requiring Internet access. This was a relief. However, I still don't have the desktop means I will have to reload Windows 7 onto the laptop. And this is not a bad thing after all because the wife has agreed that the operating system will now be in English. My theory is that I lost Windows 7 because I wasn't pressing the right buttons when Chinese menu choices came up.

I smacked a kid that was kicking Tony. The kid started to cry and I felt sorry. How quickly my anger turned to shame.