Right now I don't work. On August 8th 1992, I had a stroke. I was paralyzed on my right side. I was only in the hospital about 2 weeks, it seemed alot longer. I had physical therapy to regain use of my right side, it all came back except my right hand, I can't do much with it but, I still do the exercises, maybe someday:) The first week I couldn't remember my kids names. I had speech therapy, I couldn't talk at all, they say. I thought I sounded fine. I guess I spoke gibberish. That was hard, I couldn't remember the alphabet. That's pretty much ok now, but sometimes I can't remember letters or what they're called, or I mix words up, that's usually when I'm tired. All in all I'm pretty lucky, it could have been worse. They never could tell me why I had a stroke. They don't run in my family and I didn't fit any of their categories for strokes. That kinda scared me, I kept thinking I was going to have another one, when I was at home. It's been 15 years so I don't worry about that anymore, much!





I live in a very small town in central South Dakota, the population is approx 71. I've lived in big cities and medium cities, I'd pick a very small town any day. There's a restaurant-lounge(they also sell a few groceries) a gas station and a grain elevator. My oldest Michelle lives in the next town over, 9 miles away. It's bigger, population approx 750. Michelle works in Pierre, she's a nurse. Shane lives in Pierre and Mandi, Jordan & Jovan live in Onida.

My big brother sold me the first computer I ever had. It was an Atari 800 with a 810 disk drive. He had just bought a new one, the Atari 130XE with a 1050 disk drive. It was in 1984 I had just started college and I thought it would come in handy. Eventually I ended up with all his old computers, all Atari's. That was ok with me. I was still using the Atari 130XE in October 1998.(the kids still use them for games) I went home (Bismarck, ND) for a visit and he gave me the computer I use now. It's old but, it works great. I've only totally screwed it up 3 times. Someday I'd like to get a different one, but only because I'd like more memory (I have 16) and a bigger hard drive (I have 811MB with 300 free most of the time) otherwise I'd be perfectly happy with this one. The boys complain sometimes and say it's to slow, but at least they have a computer at home and can go on the internet.

When I first went on the internet, I was so excited, I signed up for anything and everything I came across. Newsletters, email accounts, updates on web sites, you name it, I signed up for it. That was ok until, I was spending most of the day reading email, checking email accounts. It was taking so long to do that the boys would be home from school and wanting their time on the computer. (they each get 1 hour everyday, weekends longer) So I cut down on the email accounts (I don't know why I thought I needed so many). I had 25, now I have 7. I really read my email and unsubscribed to any that really didn't interest me. That helped alot, then I found that I could have my own web page, and you'll never guess what I did. Yep I sure did, hadn't learned my lesson yet. I signed up for and started 30 web sites. I think I actually had more than that, but I couldn't remember where some of them were and one of the times I messed up my computer my brother had to reformat my hard drive. I lost a bunch of information I had in my mail folders. The first couple of web sites I did were hard. I didn't know a thing about HTML. I went to the bookstore and bought a bunch of books, it was like a foreign language. I used a online editor at first. then I experimented with some HTML editors, freeware and shareware. I just could not figure it out. I went everywhere on the net that had information or tutorials on HTML. I was feeling really stupid. I read everything I could find, finally I found a tutorial that I actually understood. It made it seem so simple, it finally clicked. Other tutorials had said the same things. The one that made sense to me I found at Boogie Jack's web site. I couldn't get my printer to print out the tutorial, I sent Boogie Jack an email and asked if he knew why, he was most helpful. I still go to his web site practically everyday. Well that's enough about me. If you have a comments or suggestions for me, Email me! :)