distractions

I had a pretty rough night last night. Dad is not doing well at all, in fact he's basically back to where he started, thanks to the side effects of his medicine becoming to intolerable to bear. He has a doctor's appointment this afternoon to determine if there's anything else to be done. I won't have news until this evening and I've been on pins and needles ever since, fearing that I'll have to go home sooner than expected. I tossed and turned for many hours last night, finally taking something to help me sleep. I managed to amble downstairs to see Steph off this morning but fell back into bed to sleep in a little, which is a luxury I rarely afford myself. Today I'll be doing whatever I can to distract myself from bad thoughts, including attempting to hook the new computer up. Which reminds me, I never told you what really happened with the computer, did I?

Remember back a few weeks when we were having so much trouble with the new computer? It keep restarting itself, and poor Steph was beside himself trying to make it work. It was very late one night when he came to bed with the air of a six year old that's broken his mother's favorite china - he had just blown the computer up. It turns out that, in reaching around to the back of the tower, he had accidentally flipped the voltage switch from 220 volts to 110, and the next thing he knew there was a "lightning bolt" in the tower and it died. On the outside, I did everything I could to comfort Steph, telling him that we'd take it to the computer shop, while on the inside I was thinking, "Oh my god, that's SIX HUNDRED EUROS down the drain...."

So we did take it to the computer shop, where we were resigned to salvage whatever we could, maybe replacing components from my old computer with whatever could be saved. The computer tech we talked to wasn't very encouraging, telling us that everything could well be destroyed.

A couple of days later, when Steph called the shop after receiving a message from them, he greeted the tech with, "So, is it dead?" With the speakerphone on, I heard the response, "We were able to resusitate it!" and I couldn't help but cry out, "Hallelujah! It's a miracle!"

Turns out that the power supply was the culprit, causing the computer to reboot itself over and over. When Steph flipped the voltage switch, he managed to kill the one component that was broken in the first place, and we'd have had to replace the power supply whether he'd blown it out or not.

Sometimes we catch a lucky break.