February 18: Interesting Southern phenomenon: today I went into my very first Piggly Wiggly. (Piggly Wiggly is a Southern supermarket chain.) The checkout girl caught a glimpse of my Hawaii driver’s license when I reached for my cash. “Hey!” she said, “Ain’t Hawaii one a’those... you know, one a’those.... states that ain’t quite a state? You know, it’s a... a...” and here she paused for a moment. “I dunno. But ain’t it reeeeeeeal far away?”

Guess geography isn’t a forte of some of my new neighbors.

My computer should be here soon, and I’ll be able to start Joyride for the March issue of the Internet Gazette. It’ll be fun to tell everybody how my puter got here just a few days after I left Hawaii. I’m a little nervous because the air freight company doesn’t insure computers. But it was the only way to get my system here within a week of my arrival. If I’d sent it with the rest of my household goods, I could have insured it - but the movers said it might take 5-7 weeks for my stuff to get here. How could I survive without my puter for almost two whole months?

I wish I’d been able to back up my entire system before I left. I MUST get a Zip drive one of these days.

February 21: How I miss Ito-En Iced Cappucino! The most heavily caffeinated beverage sold in convenience stores here is Mello-Yello. Another interesting Southern phenomenon: iced tea, known in Dixie as sweet tea, is the house wine of the South, and a single glass contains enough sugar to keep a small child amped for a week and a half.

Oops! Almost forgot. My computer arrived! All the boxes are right here in the living room; I’m sitting here looking at them now. Wish I’d saved the original boxes for shipping, back when I bought my puter a year ago. The air freight company apparently made do with what they had. Is that a pineapple crate?

Uh, oh. I just noticed that NONE of these boxes are marked “FRAGILE”...

An hour later: I hooked it up and turned it on and nothing happened. Totally blank screen. The case is visibly damaged. Arrrrgghhhhhhh!

Why, oh, WHY didn’t I get a Zip drive before I left Hawaii?!?

March 1: My new friends Scott and Varqa, geeks from Dixie, have fixed my puter... sorta. They put in a new motherboard and video card. They replaced the mouse. They put all the guts of my system into an old 386 case. But the sound card doesn’t work anymore. Scott will come over in a couple days to replace it. I think I’ll ask him to order a new case, too. The reset button on this one doesn’t work. And the system keeps freezing up, but when I press CTL+ALT+DEL to reboot, nothing happens. Oh, well, at least all my files and applications survived the long journey. I’ll have to get a Zip drive real soon! Too bad there’s no Computer City within a hundred-mile radius.

Today’s noteworthy Southern phenomena: All of the women seem to sport carefully sculpted bouffant hairdos and full Kabuki makeup, no matter the time or occasion. And everything’s closed on Sunday - except for the churches, which use their outdoor signs to sell salvation as aggressively as the strip joints use theirs to sell flesh.

March 17, written under the influence of heavy sinus medication: Apparently the pollen count here in Dixie has risen to unprecedented levels. Ooooh! I’m floating!

Scott came over tonight to install my new sound card and exchange the old case for the new. At some dreadful point during this seemingly simple procedure, he emerged from my office to announce that my master boot record had ceased to exist, and that all of my files, once segregated from each other in thousands of neatly accessible little containers, had been magically welded into a single undecipherable blob of electronic trash.

Yes, it’s true. Everything on my hard drive is GONE.

If I could feel my head, I’d probably be totally hysterical.

Today’s Southern phenomenon: Two streets down, past Lee’s Landing (as in Robert E. Lee) and Civil War Drive (I’m not making this up), one can take a sharp left onto Confederate Road, go toward the river... and see house trailers.

Not just any house trailers, no sirree. House trailers on stilts.

April 18: Well, my puter DID have a lot of extra stuff on it, I guess. First novels are usually pretty lousy; who am I to think that mine might be any different? And all those lost graphics and lines of HTML code for my new and improved website - could it be some higher, hyper-Gatesian power trying to tell me that I need a fresher approach to web design? So now my drive’s all squeaky clean, waiting for me to fill it up with the Great American Trashy Novel, and the most brilliant website the world has ever seen.

If only the dang thing would stay booted up.

Dixie trivia of the day: the state motto of South Carolina is Dum Spiro Spero - While I breathe, I hope.

Caroline Wright, of WRIGHT FOR YOU Word Services, is a freelance writer. A former resident of Hawaii, she now lives in rural South Carolina. Feel free to e-mail your comments to Caroline at cw@wrightforyou.com.