My failing memory

I’ve just been reminded of an apparently heroic deed I did years ago, and I can’t remember it. Given the drama involved, that’s a bit surprising.

It was maybe fifteen years ago, at the barn where I was boarding my horse. A woman there had a youngish (five or six years old) Thoroughbred gelding, a well-trained, well-mannered, good-minded horse when she bought him. Within a couple of months, through mishandling, crappy riding, and late-night drunken beatings in his stall, she’d turned him into a murderous lunatic.

People tried to help her, tried to save the horse with advice, instruction, admonishments. She refused to listen. She continued to ride him, longe him, and abuse him.

What follows is what I was told happened one day; as I say, even after being reminded of the incident I can barely scrape up a few wisps of memory, and they’re mostly of her pigheaded stubbornness and cruelty.

One day she was longeing Dash in the ring, whipping him as usual, when suddenly he charged her, hellbent on murder, and knocked her down. I’m told I raced into the ring, grabbed the longe line near his halter despite his flailing forelegs, and forced him back away from her long enough for her to scramble out of the ring.

How I then got away from him and escaped injury, I don’t recall, nor how I felt afterwards, though no doubt it was the normal adrenalin crash into sick shakiness. Looking back with the cold calmness of distance, I almost regret doing it, since if ever a person deserved what was going to happen it was her. And yet, as the person who reminded me of this said, you don’t think; you just do what has to be done in the moment.

This woman eventually left the barn and took poor Dash with her to her home nearby. (I omit some other awfulness related to her as not germane to this story.) We learned sometime later that she’d ridden him out into the woods and been thrown and badly injured. All I could feel then was satisfaction at her finally paying some price for her cruelty, and pity for the poor horse who would of course be blamed for the consequences of her folly. Knowing how far beyond salvaging he was at that point I could only hope that he was given a merciful release from his suffering and put down.

So, as noted, I remember some of the details surrounding the episode, but the heroic deed itself is basically a blank in my mind still. Lord knows I can recall with annoying clarity so many dumb or embarrassing moments from my past, so why can’t I remember this?

When it rains, it pours....

My primary laptop, a Dell over ten years old, had begun showing signs of instability, climaxing in a crash. I was able to turn it back on and it worked as usual, but I decided to take it in to my local computer shop, and have them swap out the hard drive -- an almost new solid state drive I'd replaced the original with less than a year ago. Plus swapping it got me a newer machine but with my preferred Windows 7 OS and all my settings preserved.

Fortunately I have a backup laptop, a Gateway. Given I run my business via email and do a lot of proofreading checking of names and terms via Google, plus need to run printers and scanners, redundancy is a no-brainer. So I fired up the backup, and did some websurfing before settling down to work.

Everything was going fine, when suddenly as I was moving the cursor to click on a favorite link.... BAM! I'm hijacked to a "Windows support" page, with a dire warning, on screen and being monotonously repeated by a woman's voice, that I'd been redirected to a pornographic website and had five minutes to call the number on the screen so that a technician could walk me through how to free myself.

I could move the cursor but nothing else worked -- couldn't even get to the shut off button. So I took out the battery. When I put it back in and turned the laptop back on, the same damned screen and voice came up. I debatteried again, put it back in, and tried starting in safe mode. It came up in limited form, but when I tried clicking on the Firefox icon, it opened on a page with a clearly porn URL. Shut it off and hauled out a notebook with Windows 10 on it (which I hate; my working computers are Win7) and used it for whatever work checking I needed to do.

Sigh. Off I went to the computer shop the next morning, where I was able to collect my rehoused primary laptop, and left the prisoner of porn site to be reamed out and restored. That laptop happens to be one I hadn't installed Adblock on since I rarely use it for web browsing, but since I suspect I got the infection from my cursor dragging over an infected ad (I certainly wasn't clicking on any unknown links!) I'll for sure install that when I get the machine back sometime next week.

You don't want to know what this is costing me. And out of an abundance of caution last night I logged onto my desktop (yes, I have three Internet-connected computers, plus two ancient XP machines offline but still functioning) and changed a bunch of passwords, just to be safe -- so now I've had to change them on the returned laptop, and will have to go through all that when I get the Gateway back.

Ah, computers, how much easier they've made our lives....