So this morning, through no fault of her own, Jane spilled a full glass of milk across the kitchen table…and onto my laptop, on which I was reading the morning’s news. I turned it off, and dried it off, and let it air dry during the day, and it appears to be working now. Except for two things: the CapsLock key doesn’t work (why? The milk didn’t land on that end of the keyboard), and I can only get a capital “I” using the shift key on the righthand side of the keyboard. The shift key on the lefthand side of the keyboard works fine for every key…but “I”.

Wait a minute….the “I” is working again….but the CapsLock still doesn’t work.

Now if only I could understand why “LeftShift-i” wasn’t giving me “I” to begin with. I can’t think of any reasons that make sense. I can think of reasons why the “i” key might fail altogether, and I can think of reasons why the LeftShift key might fail altogether, but I can’t think of any reason why that combination, and only that combination, would fail.

And how come my web browser says “Display a Menu” on the status line when I press the CapsLock key?

I’m confused.

Update: Now my “Down Arrow” key doesn’t work, and the guy at the computer store said, “By all means bring it in–it needs to get cleaned out as soon as possible. In the meantime, leave it turned off.” So I’ve hooked up my external backup drive to my kids’ eMac (and ain’t it slow, though!) and I’m presently copying all of my user files from my external backup drive to my other external drive so that I can run off of my external backup drive without feeling like I’ve got no backup. It looks like it’s got about two more hours to go. Then I can begin to think about paying the bills.

Note to readers: if you don’t have a good backup of your computer, make one. This can happen to you.