It didn't even say goodbye

Dragon Mood? -- *sniff, sniff* "buh-bye, computer"

[I'm writing this on Thursday, but back-dating it for last Sunday.]

Saturday morning, when I had gotten up, I tried to get on the computer. I hit the ON button and nothing happened. I mean nothing happened. Just the night before, eight or nine hours earlier, I had been on the computer and everything was fine. Now, it was completely dead. I checked all the electrical connections, the surge protection was in place and other peripherals seemed to have power. Just not the CPU box.

Saturday afternoon, Mark, Lindsey and baby Preston were visiting. Mark is something of a geek so we asked him to have a look at it. He concluded that maybe our power supply something or other was burned out (not the geekiest of technical jargon), because the CPU couldn't even be turned on.

I called a place he recommended. They were open until six and I told them I was bringing the box in. I didn't tell S this, but I wanted our computer functional -- I had a bunch of pictures I wanted to upload to flickr!!!!

Suddenly, Mark was asking if we wanted to take the baby with us to the computer place while he and Lindsey made a grocery run to Meijers. Methinks he saw an opportunity to be alone with his honey. We both said, "Sure!," so Mark hustled our CPU out to the Volvo, we loaded S and Preston in the back seat of the Volvo, they took off for Meijers and we headed to this geek shop.

S and I got totally bad news about our computer: a blown capacitor, a hanging ventilation fan (it was attached to the box only by the electrical wires connection) and a fried motherboard! Yikes -- no wonder the damn thing wouldn't turn on.

So, we made a two-minute decision to buy a rebuilt CPU for about $400. We set the baby's carseat on the floor and wandered around while they cannibalized our CPU, pulled out our hard drive and our video card, and started rebuilding this "new" machine. LIterally within 20 or 30 minutes, it was ready to go.

We loaded the new CPU, the baby and his carseat back into the Volvo and went and got a soft-serve ice cream to celebrate our new computer! We were waiting to get a call from Mark and Lindsey that they were home from their shopping trip so we just drove around, talking, passing the time. Preston fell asleep.

It was an unexpected and interesting afternoon to be sure!