It sounds like I should be flexing my dorsal muscles, like a Ms. Olympia bodybuilding contestant

"Whoa!  Did you see her?!  Did you see the bulging capacitors on that woman?!"

Once again, though, we are not speaking of a human being here; we are speaking of my work computer.  After a day of being carefully prodded, poked, replaced, and tested, the computer was waiting for me at my desk when I arrived.  (It did, however, die the death twice while all this was going on...though S. assured me--assured me--that it was okay.)

I turned on the computer.  Watched the Dell progress bar do its thang.  Waited breathlessly for Windoze to boot up.  And...

*Poof*!

It did it again when I rebooted.

I had had it.  I marched our student worker through the admin offices to a workstation that I knew was empty.  I flourished a hand at the lonely computer, commanding, "Bring it to my office!", which she promptly did.  I spent the day loading all my special programs and configurations onto the computer, and updating various programs.

When S. came in, he poked his head into my office.  "I don't understand!  It worked in my office!"

A Great Truth:  programmers and software and hardware support people have variations of that as a motto.  "It worked on my machine!"

So he hauled it back to his den of hardware, fiddled with it, and finally emerged to pronounce The Sentence of Doom:  "It has bulging capacitors.  The motherboard is shot."

The happy end result:  a new computer is wending its way through the Dell factory, and should be on my desktop next Thursday, at which point I will spend another day loading all my programs onto it and updating things.

On the Bad Mommy front:

Last week at ballet class, the teachers had said, "Come in costume next week!"

Did I remember?

No, I did not.

We pulled into the parking lot and piled out of the Little Green Car.  As we were walking up to the door of the dance school, I saw a little ballerina in a winter jacket and...a witch's hat.

My heart stopped.  Ohmigawd.  Costumes!!

We went in.  OmegaDotter was confronted by cute little tutu'ed black cats...witches...bunnies...fairies...Jasmines...tigers...owls...

She shrank against me.  "Moooooomy...." she whimpered.   She slunk into the studio, the very picture of dejection.  She pleaded a potty break, to get away from the costumes.  I was able to get her back in, and she did enjoy the dancing.  Luckily, there was one other little ballerina who was non-costumed.

Buuuut.  Oooba-dooba, that was a true Bad Mommy Moment.

Technorati: Motherboard, computer crash, Windoze, Bad Mommy