The Cleansing Fire: There is a natural phenomenon where an old growth forest gets hits with a fire and it is destroyed. A few months later God starts all over and new growth begins and the forest is usually healthier than it was the year before. No one really wants the fire, they even try to put it out when it is happening, but months later every says that it is great to see the new forest.

My laptop has just had that cleansing fire. I had it loaded up with everything under the sun and then it crashed last week. The solution from my service folks was to replace the hard drive and now everything is running wonderfully, albeit without anything that I had before. Part of the new way that I will operate is to do as much on the net as possible. I am no longer using my beloved Outlook, but instead use Gmail (with my domain) for my e-mail. I have my spreadsheets and documents being stored in Google apps. I planned a trip today using Mapquest instead of my favorite MapPoint. I didn't like this much and will probably reload MapPoint again on Monday though.

It isn't really fun to lose everything, but it is so fun to start over!