I'm glad to here from you Florence. You have such an important place here. We all miss you. At least now you know what is wrong with your hip and have a prognosis. You will be up and about by spring though I know it will take sometime for you to be 100%. And the same for your daughter, it will take time. In my opinion her husband didn't leave soon enough. I'm hoping that with your help she may find the same comfort and inspiration in growing things that I have found in difficult times. I believe that as important as a love is he does not complete your life. You find that completeness in yourself and then share it with someone who is worthy. My very best wishes to you and all your family.

My eldest DD is working with the District Attorney's office and had a recent encounter in court with the judge who'd sentenced my son. Apparently judge has got a reputation as being difficult and tends to be more lenient toward women than men. She's kicked people out of her courtroom because she didn't feel they were properly attired (even victims assistant advocates!) or behaving the way she felt they should. DD said that some of the victims her office represents have filed official complaints against this judge. So, we figured that my son had 2 strikes against him right up front...he went to court that day wearing skinny jeans (as he has done for years), sneakers and a clean T-shirt with an overshirt. Said judge does not like that look apparently. Had he worn a suit & tie I'm sure she wouldn't have been so harsh. Well, we're still going to work on that appeal and use that judges complaints in the request for expungement.

You're very welcome! Glad to be of help. When you paste into Works, see if under Edit, if there's a "Paste Special" option. If so choose "Plain Text" or wording close to that. It's been a long long time since I've used Works and I greatly dislike the program for several reasons so I can't be more specific there. Or just drop it into a text file then recopy it. happyday's examples are (part of) why Firefox has moved down consistently in my browser choices. (It took them 10 years to get Paste & Go as a part of the browser fer cryin out loud! LOL) Back in the early versions it was my backup browser to Opera but I've never found it functional enough to make it my first choice and it went downhill for several versions though they seem to have plateaued a bit. I still stick with Opera as #1. It's far more refined and professional. Even with the mail client and other features built in it's still smaller, lighter and much faster than Firefox. You can configure it in so many ways, skin it if you want and much more. I'm spoiled with the keyboard shortcuts and it drives me crazy when I use any other browser now - I hit X & Z and other shortcuts and of course they don't work. Firefox is too geeky and patched together, being a committee project (where committee members aren't focused) and accordingly it requires constant updates and modifications and you have to add extensions to it to get basic performance though I will say some are interesting for other features. I simply want to use a browser with minimal fuss (Really pretty silly to have to put 25 extensions onto a browser to have it perform as a browser should "out of the box") and I do like the larger screen area on Opera and ability to configure to each user's needs. My second choice is K-meleon, third is Chrome. I've tried Safari but that's a very basic browser too from what I've seen and don't need another of them. I still use Firefox for the webmail check but Chrome now has the same/comparable extension so Firefox might just get retired altogether from my systems. I don't automatically load it on new systems anymore. Don't get me wrong, I like the open source concept and OpenOffice is proof of what can be done with open source. Just seems like too much bickering going on with the Firefox folks and there's no focus to the project. Which reminds me, instead of using Works, get OpenOffice. Far more functional, it's free and has a lot of compatibility with Microsoft Office that Works does not have. Far better choice than Works. It also has the paste special feature. It's an excellent program. I only use (therefore only set up) the "writer" (word processor) portion since I don't need spreadsheets often or the other items. Whenever I set up computers for clients I remove Works if it's on there to save myself support issues! It's really bad news IMO. OpenOffice, Opera, Comodo, etc are all on the essential list of software and get loaded up when I set them up. But I digress! Incidentally the encoding thing should work in any browser. I thought I said that but it sounds like I might not have made that clear to everyone. Just to clarify. Hope your browsing is much clearer now with less extraneous characters!

wanda_va, having seen some crazy things happen over the decades I've worked on computers, I can't envision *anything* as backing up too much! LOL But, if you're serious on the importance of the data being that high, then I would personally be a bit nervous about that backup regiment. Granted, I'm a bit of a worrywart when it comes to backups but here's my concerns: The automatic backup is fine *if* and that's a big if the backup works right. Are you testing (checking) that it's backing up and the data is readable? And is it doing separate backups so there's redundancy on there or does it overwrite the data? I'd prefer separate copies. Glitches happen and Murphy's law can apply at times. If there's a power surge, a bad sector on the drive or any number of other reasons it *could* happen to not back it up completely. I like that you're doing backups in different ways. Good for you. Again with CD/DVD, be sure to check that you can read them and I'd even test them on a different machine to ensure compatibility. Although rare, I've seen alignment troubles on a recording drive that makes it so the CD could only be read on the recording machine. Kudos for getting copies (assumably current) off-site. Be sure that they're not sitting in the sun or something since CDs/DVDs are pretty susceptible to damage. The 2 nd computer is a good method, but the risk of that one being stolen or lost in a fire or other disaster is there. The importance of off-site is fire make that any disaster whether it be fire, tornado, flood, hurricane, theft or even vandalism (intentional or not) or otherwise. Having been the victim of theft of my system, and they even took the backups, I have extra precautions in this regard. Frequency of backup will vary with how much and how often things change. And I should add there's no perfect backup regiment and no regiment that's perfect for everyone. But knowledge is power as they say so know the risks and weigh the ones that might happen to you. wanda_va, I'd really consider the value of the data. If it's records you truly would be in dire straits to lose then you might want to add some redundancy in the backups. One could even be an online backup to a good site that specializes in backup preservation. Possibly a second drive and alternate and/or some flash drives or something. In real life I'd speculate that, for instance the photos and patterns would be upsetting possibly but not truly end of the world to lose. Documents too, might fall in this category. Financial records could be something important. I had one client whose entire automotive repair business was on their computer. All payroll/tax records, billing, invoices, bookkeeping records and the drive died with no backup except a minor amount of paper printouts. There was quite a scramble to recreate those records by calling customers (from memory) to ask them for records to do income taxes. Now *that* was a stressful time! country_bumpkin_al, the important thing is to take the first step. Doing something is better than nothing in this regard. Take a few minutes and decide the most important things and that'll tell you what to back up. Feel free to ask for help, I'd be glad to give whatever assistance I can.