Caturdays — Zoey the Cool Cat

My computer has been out of action since early Friday morning due to the FBI Moneypak virus. I’m quite computer literate in protecting my computers but Friday morning I was on the Internet without actually being at my computer and the FBI Moneypak virus got me.

It had gotten me a few times before but I was always at the computer and caught it before it dug too deeply into my computer. It is one of the few malware viruses that seems to get past Microsoft Windows Defender, Norton Antivirus, and McAfee.

Friday morning it dug itself so deeply into my computer that Restore didn’t work, none of the Safe Modes worked, and booting from a flash drive, CD, and DVD didn’t work.

My only two options were to either restore back to the factory settings or re-install Windows 7. Both would delete all my installed software and might delete any necessary files that I had not moved off the C: drive and onto external hard drives. Fortunately, from what I can tell now that I’m back up and running is that all of my valuable files are on external hard drives and I didn’t lose anything.

Re-installing all the software I had — Photoshop and Bridge, Lightroom, CorelDRAW, PaintShop Pro, Photo-Paint, Office, Audacity, Quick & Easy Organizer, VideoStudio Pro, among others — was the biggest nightmare, especially since I couldn’t get onto the Internet. My Adobe and Office products are Cloud products, so I would have to have Internet connection to download Cloud software.

Turns out that re-installing Windows 7 had also deleted some hardware drivers, like the one that allows me to access the Internet, my graphics card driver, and a couple others.

I finally got Internet connection back at 11:30 this morning. I didn’t have time to do much because I was scheduled to be at Second Chance Dog Rescue from 1:00-3:30 p.m. for volunteer orientation. I had so much fun keeping the dogs company, so much fun that I only have two dog pictures from 3½ hours. So few pictures in that amount of time is something that probably hasn’t happened in about twenty years.

When I got home, I told Zoey the Cool Cat that I had been out with the dogs. She wasn’t too happy, especially since I told her that Monday blog posts would be dedicated to dogs, hopefully featuring many of the dogs from Second Chance Dog Rescue. She suggested that if I were going to let Mondays go to the dogs, perhaps we could have Caturdays for the cats. I think she’s on to something, so today’s first Caturdays post will feature Zoey the Cool Cat. Future posts will also feature cats of all shapes and sizes, big cats from the Zoo and Safari Park, feral cats from the San Diego jetty, cats that help me out at home inspections, etc.

Here is our little Zoey the Cool Cat, looking very queenly:

 

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