Now, I have had some good days in my time. Days when everything seemed to just fall neatly into place, days when the weather was perfect and everyone was laughing and everything worked perfectly.

Yesterday wasn't it.

I dropped off a CD of digital pictures to have prints made at the Target. It's a one-hour photo shop; I figured on dropping them off, going to my chiropractor appointment, and them swinging back by to pick them up before going back to work.

No dice. Their print machine was broken. They had a sign up saying that they couldn't promise prints until Wednesday evening. It wasn't really a big deal - I don't need the prints right away or anything - it just would've been convenient to be able to pick them up while I was out and about anyway.

While I was doing that, Matt went to Lowe's to get sealant for the deck. We'd bought some stuff about a month ago, and then when the weather finally cleared up enough for us to think about putting it down, he read the fine print on the can and saw that it wasn't intended for new wood.

So he went back to Lowe's for new-wood sealant. And couldn't find any. Whaddafu?

I spent an hour on a conference call for work, during which the guy in charge of the process audit preparations essentially denigrated my work on the audit and my whole office, though he was diplomatic about it.

I got home from work, and found that the maid service had come, which was expected, and that my computer had been turned off, which wasn't. It's a laptop, and I'd left it on the arm of the couch when I left for work. I guessed the maid knocked it over - sometimes that will jiggle the power supply and turn it off - and just picked it back up without thinking about it.

When I turned it back on, the battery icon in the corner indicated that it was running on battery power, even though the AC adapter was plugged in. I jiggled the plug. I tested to make sure the plug was firmly in the wall. I twisted it in the socket. Nothing.

Maybe the AC adapter had been damaged in the fall. I've been having occasional glitchy problems with it lately, anyway. I took my computer over to Matt's side of the couch and plugged into his AC adapter.

Nothing.

I jiggled and twisted some more. And still more.

Nope. The computer absolutely refused to recognize that there was anything but battery power.

I cursed a lot, and called the maid service and left a polite but terse message, and cursed some more. I made some calculations and then I made a decision, and I posted a blog entry saying that I was going to be buying a new computer, but that until it showed up, I was going to be a bit scarce, since I'd have to be swapping my battery in and out of Matt's computer to charge it, and that would be a little frustrating to do too frequently.

Matt got home with Penny, and she'd only had one nap all day, so she took a nap when they got home. She slept until about 6, then woke up and was the Saddest Baby Ever for a good half-hour, and then medium-fussy until we put her to bed around 7:30.

I don't know if it was the injury from last Friday, or the chiropractic adjustment yesterday, or a bit of both, but by 9:00 my back was killing me. I went to bed. At 10, I was still trying to find a comfortable position. I went and took some Advil, and finally went to sleep around 11.

Penny woke up at 4:30 this morning. She went back to sleep before Matt even got to her bedroom door, but I couldn't go back to sleep. I think I dozed for ten or fifteen minutes sometime between 5:00 and 5:30, but that was about it.

When Penny woke up for good at 5:45, I thought, I'm awake anyway, maybe I should get up instead of Matt. But then I thought, It's his turn. I could really use another 15 minutes of sleep, if I can get it. So Matt got up.

I should've listened. I dragged myself out of bed a little after six, and went to the top of the stairs. I could hear the baby happily babbling to herself, so I was about to turn around and go get in the shower when I heard, "Dammit, dammit, DAMMIT!" from Matt.

Penny had knocked his computer on the floor.

No, really, go on and guess what happened.

Same damn problem. No recognition of the AC. If he hadn't witnessed her knocking the computer on the floor, I'd wonder if we'd been infected with a virus. And now there isn't a computer to charge the batteries for the other. So we'll both be offline a lot for a while.

Matt was not already saving up to buy a new computer soon, though, so he was much less sanguine about his breaking. He's going to do some research and see if he can fix the problem himself, before trying to decide whether to pay to have it fixed at our "local" (half-hour away) Mac repair shop (that has really awful hours, I might add), or whether to just bite the bullet and scrape together enough to buy a new one.

In the meantime, I'm going to have to try to figure out how to get my e-mail downloaded from Widomaker. Matt's got a full shell account, so he can wade through it from work, but I can't even log in via shell. If you need to get in touch with me quickly, your best bet is going to be a phone beep, or maybe e-mail sent to my MyWay account (see the contact page for my address). I'll try to remember to check it a few times a day from work.

Maybe I shouldn't have turned in my remote-access keyfob for my work computer last month.

More information as events develop, I guess.

--Liz