Well I am up and running

After my various computer woes, I now have a brand new hard drive (to which I have been re-installing all the software) and so far so good. However, a bizarre thing happened when I was loading some new photos. As is usual with Windows 7 (or maybe not, but usual in my experience), photos that were taken in the vertical (portrait) format must be rotated manually. I have done this many, many times and the application says "saving" and then it appears in my pictures folder as a vertical photo. Well, after doing this a couple of times I started to realize that the pictures were disappearing! Yikes! However, when I would do a search under the file name, it would say it was saved in the folder. Huh?? After various futile attempts at understanding this and doing tests I decided to ask Microsoft for help. They indicated via their website that I would need to contact the computer manufacturer. On no! Not again!

I plaintively cried out loud "I just want my system back to the way it was...".

Then I saw they had a site where kind souls help others with their problems and I keyed in "rotating pictures" and astonishingly, several people were writing in to say that every time they would rotate a picture it would disappear! One poor woman was distraught because she had taken pictures of her daughter saying good-bye to her father (the woman's husband) for some unknown destination (possibly Afganistan?!) and now her pictures were gone.

Well, thanks to some really smart people, they figured it out that the latest version of McAfee virus protection (which I guess I now have) is responsible. How discernible is that?! I would never have thought of it.

And two solutions were proposed: return to an earlier version of the virus protection until the company corrects it or unhide files. (For some reason, the virus protection program labels a rotated file as a file to be hidden.)

I chose the second option and so far, all is well. This of course, took until 1:00 am this morning to do! I am rather stubborn sometimes and stick with things to the bitter end.

Anyway, I am now in a position to share a couple of new photos with you so here they are:



Grasshopper


Viceroy butterfly (a mimic of the Monarch butterfly)