Monday night

Got home shortly before 8:00, i.e., pretty late. Huge thunderstorm downtown with flooding, so the traffic was just crawling.

Talked briefly to HP Support today and they told me my desktop was "obsolete" and no longer supported by telephone support, but was supported by online chat. That worked out, since I wasn't calling from home anyway -- and the desktop is here at home. So, when I (finally) got home, fed the cats and changed clothes, I got in touch with the chat support.

"Jack" asked some questions; we tried a few things, including disconnecting the cables from the hard drive. The thing wouldn't boot to BIOS so he could do a test. He said there seemed to be an issue with the motherboard and that it needed hands-on servicing and gave me a link to locate a place to take it. I was online with him for well over an hour. We also tried to back up my hard drive by first connecting it to my old Pavilion, but the Pavilion was dead in the water. I didn't want to lose a bunch of files, so we did not do a recovery, which would have returned the disk to its factory-fresh state.

I'd bought some more of those chuck steaks this weekend, on sale again. I really like them. Last time, I marinated them for 24 hours in all kinds of stuff. This time I just coated them with yellow mustard for a while, then scraped that off and fried them in olive oil. They're a bit chewy but not tough, and tasty. As long as the store keeps offering these at a decent price ($3.79/lb.), I'll buy them. They're cheaper and leaner than hamburger. My mother used to buy them (for herself for lunch). They're not that thick and don't take long to cook. Much tastier than cubed steaks. I just salt them and grind fresh black pepper on top.