the good, the bad and the ugly

Seems like I am stealing a title from somewhere so I will be honest, I am.
I stole this title from the movie or rather I am borrowing it from the movie.
They can have it back when I am done.
Also my sequence of the title will not be in that order.
I should call it:
"the bad, the ugly and the good".
It is always better to end on a high note.

the bad....
                I have owned my own business for thirty years. It is a small lettering shop.  We do silk screening, embroidery, tackle twill and chenille.  I have 10 to 15 employees, depending on how busy we are.  I am not getting rich.  In most years we barely make enough to want to stay open.  My wife supplements our income as a hairdresser.  But it is "our" business and we get by.
We have never had an accident in our shop.  No employee had ever been hurt.
This year we got a visit from Cal-OSHA and we just got our notice of a hefty fine for safety violations.
No injuries, no employee complaints but we were fined anyway.

the ugly.....
               Two weeks ago I got a virus in my personal lap top that I used to write with.  It ate my internet card, my sound card and who knows what else. It will not allow me to drag and drop or to copy and save and it will not allow me to load an anti-virus program.  I thought I was protected but somehow it got through.  Since I back up everything on a memory stick  I thought I was OK.  I took the stick to work to download  a story I was working on.  I put the unfinished article on one computer and then took the stick to another computer to down load some pictures I needed.  I guess the virus was on the stick because both hard drives on my business computers totally crashed.  Three computers down the stinking drain, and incidentally all of my writing.

update on virus
I am still not sure if  I can recover all my writing.  I do have a lot in my note books but will probably never go back and re-type it all.

I bayed at the quarter moon last night and that seemed to help.

the good....
               In the mean time, we have puppies, lots and lots of puppies.  Chewy, our gray and white Schnauzer had 4 puppies one week ago and Shy-lo, our black Schnauzer had 8 puppies Thursday morning.  They have all been to the vet and are in good health.  Chewy's  puppies are fat little butter balls but Shy-lo's puppies are small and look like little black moles.  The father of both litters is Lo-Jack, our gray and white Schnauzer.  He is rather perplexed by the whole thing.  He is curious and wants to check them out but Shy-lo and Chewy will not let him get near them.  Since Chewy only had four we gave her two of Shy-lo's so that each mom would nurse six.  It seems to work out quite well and both mothers treat all the puppies as there own.

Shy-lo is my on personal dog or rather I should say that I belong to her.  She follows me where ever I go (except to class).  Wednesday night I was on puppy watch but around 4 A.M. I fell asleep in my recliner with Shy-lo on my lap.  I was sure she would not have the puppies that night because she didn't seem to be in labor.  I woke up at 5 A.M. with shy-lo cleaning herself and a little wet puppy down in the side of the chair.  She had the puppy while setting on my chest.

Don't ever hire me to guard your house.  Thieves could take what they wanted to, Cal-OSHA would fine you, your computers would go wacky and you would end up with a house full of puppies, while I peacefully dozed away,