Most of the regular readers of this site know that domesticat's web server was down for a few days due to a very bizarre set of circumstances. Fewer of you know that I maintain a Hotmail drop box, which I use to protect my real addresses from spam.

Since I had a bit of warning that the server was going down last week, I sent out an email to friends saying that they should use my Hotmail dropbox until my @domesticat addresses were usable again.

Tenzing was the first to throw caution to the wind and creep in.

I followed behind him a moment or two later, flashlight clenched firmly in hand, and then I started howling with laughter. "Jeff! Come see! Tenzing's scoping out the computer room, and you should see the bottle-brush tail he's got!"It took Jeff a few moments to make his way to the computer room, where I shone the flashlight on Tenzing's still-puffy tail. He was crouched down, still wary, still suspicious, but his curiosity had once again gotten the better of him.

She's been needing a bit of an upgrade for quite some time, my computer has, and tonight she got the first part of it. My computer previously only had 128M of RAM. Not bad, for most people. However, when the person in question is notorious for running mail programs, winamp, multiple web browsers, photoshop, and homesite—all at once, mind you—the code for these programs starts to act like recalcitrant three-year-olds.

When we went house-hunting in 1999, we deliberately chose to look for a three-bedroom house. Not because we planned to have children, but to slake our burgeoning computer habit. A bedroom for us, a bedroom for guests, and a bedroom that we could turn into an office of sorts—a home for our computers.

In the land of computers, there are few things more destructive or annoying than having to completely wipe a hard drive clean and then reinstalling every piece of software on it. Which, of course, is exactly what Jeff and I did to my computer on Sunday.

I've been having problems with my computer lately.

It's not unlike going to a psychotherapist; it's a serious measure and isn't to be taken lightly. One wouldn't go to a computer psychotherapist and say, "Once a week or so, things just aren't right—I'll open a program and it'll just bomb on me," then dab at your eyes with a pocket hankie.

Dr. Wipe-And-Reinstall generally hears complaints like this: "My computer freezes at least once a day for reasons unknown. It hates these particular programs. When I have Outlook open, I can't always open Mozilla. I have to reboot at least once a day—if the freeze doesn't get me first—because one of my programs has sprung a memory leak."

The good news is that I'm almost entirely back up to speed. I lack installing a couple of small utilities, getting my webcam and scanner working, and then reinstalling my HTML editor, and then I'm totally back up. Pleased, yes, I am. This has been a quick wipe-and-reinstall.