Hooray for Mary! Before Christmas, Carol and I took the plunge and bought a new desktop computer. Not any desktop, but an Apple G-something, with the really big screen. We also ditched the dial-up and subscribed to a DSL line. The G-something stayed in the box until the kids all arrived for Christmas, and then Walt-Make, somebody younger anyway, put it all together and got us on the air with the "Airport Express". Even the Sewells seemed impressed when they arrived for Christmas brunch. (I think it was the big screen.)

Walter had brought with him his new wide-screen HP laptop and with no wires got on the internet through our wireless port. I lusted after the lap top, which is a commentary on the direction that lust takes as one approaches 60 years of age.

So when we visited Walter and Morgan in Austin in early February, he took us to Frye's, and I bought an HP laptop like his, except that, since I'm the Dad, I got it with more memory than his. Memory gets more and more important as one approaches 60 years of age.

Back home the thing just didn't work. Carol, who is indefatigable when it comes to getting things to work, especially things that I can't get to work, spent hours and hours trying to make the HP light-up with the Airport Wireless. It got to the point where either we went to counseling or she put the thing down. Having bought the Apple G-something with the big screen, signed up for DSL, and bought the HP laptop, we couldn't afford counseling, so she put it down and it sat and sat and sat, until Mary arrived last weekend.

She fixed it. She also saved her parents' marriage, and, yes, maybe I'll go to Austin again.

Not only that, she made it so that we can run the printer from both the G-something and the HP lap top, and run them without wires to the printer from either computer. Amazing.

But she did get the Eagle Award, after all.