A while back an entrepreneur who shares a number of my research interests decided the world wouldn't be quite complete unless one of my tomes was published hardback as part of a fancy set, to include Frank Dobie's Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, McKenna's Black Range Tales, and a book the man's written, himself, about his researches and treks into the Gila, with maybe, William French's Reflections of a Western Ranchman, and Ben Kemp's Trail Dust and Saddle Leather.

We had a few meetings and came to an agreement, with me promising to burn a CD with my manuscript files aboard, and the PDF files used for the final submission for the paperbound copy.

I hadn't used the CD burner on my comp for some time.  But I began the process of doing what I'd promised, discovered that the comp evidently thinks it's burning CDs, but then it either can't read the CD it just made, or it hasn't actually burned the files to it.  Sometimes it reads the files being on it, sometimes it won't recognize a CD it's claimed it burned is even in the drive.  But sometimes the CD can be taken to another comp and reads fine.  But once it burns the files onto the CD, or thinks it has, the CD is unwilling to 'fess up and admit the files are on it about half the time.

Each of these events required about a half hour or more with all the pretended burning, copy and pasting, then asking the comp if it can read the files, while it decides whether it's going to do one of the spontaneous crashes it's prone to in the midst of one project or another.  Something you just get used to.

So I burned up a lot of CDs and gratitude affirmations, forgiveness affirmations and ended up with nothing in the way of files on any of them that I'd feel any confidence sending to the man who needs some files he can depend on.

Ah well.  Finally dragged out my backup CD that I created when the original manuscript in submission form went out for print in paperback and decided I'm going to have to just belly up to the bar and trust the US  Mail to get it to the man, and depend on him get it back to me after he's made a copy.

Sheeze.  Sometimes computers are a blessing too joyous to really digest and appreciate according to their worth.

Jack