I'm feeling mentally exhausted from all the mood swings through which Eric an I have gone today. It started out benignly enough; I woke up at 8:15 and got up to check my email and web surf. (I guess my days of being a Night Owl are forever lost to me.) I was just about to the very end of my email, when BOOM. Outlook Express crashed, and I had to reboot the machine - a Macintosh G3, by the way, which sits on a table next to a Emachines tower, which sits next to a generic Pentium 166 running Linux. "Gravy," "Biscuit," and "Bob," respectively; "Margaret," our HP Netserver LM, sits in the middle of the floor, alone and, as yet, unnetworked.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The Mac had crashed, but to my surprise, refused to come back up. I got the little computer icon in the center of the screen, smiling blandly, but refusing to proceed further. I hopped into the bedroom, where Eric still lay sleeping. After a bit of prodding, he woke up enough to tell me to try rebooting again. This time I got no smiling computer; I was treated to an icon of a little floppy disk with a question mark, which was quite effective in getting Eric out of bed and into "rescue" mode. Unressurectable, he said after a while, without a new CD-ROM drive. Our current one was behaving strangely - spinning up, then down, repeatedly, without ever actually achieving much of anything.

It was now about noon, and we had a noon appointment with Realtor Joan, who was recommended to me by a coworker. She was to show us a lovely little house in a neighboring town. Well, that was the plan, anyway. When we pulled up to the house, which was theoretically owned by a "motivated seller," we found that he was apparently not motivated enough to get his butt out to the house and unlock it. Joan proceeded to make the best of the situation by giving us a guided tour around the town. What she actually did was to drive us past all the mansions she could find, making those houses we could afford look like dung heaps. Eric and I felt like crying when we pulled up to another of our potential houses and found an ancient building with major cracks in its concrete walls. We thanked her, and she dropped us off at home.

We then headed out to lunch. I was trying to stay positive, until Eric stated,

"I guess we're doomed to live in a shithole."

Oof. Flashbacks to a childhood full of tension and a mother who got almost physically ill whenever we had to spend money on clothing or groceries. She hated spending money at all, and I grew up fighting those same money worries. It's only been in the last year or so that I've actually felt comfortable buying things for myself, and now Eric was bringing me back to all those worries. I was angry at him, now, and even angrier at the whole situation.

We fought. We screamed. I said that if he was so concerned about finances, that we'd work on a weekly budget over lunch. He said we couldn't work on it over lunch, that we needed paycheck stubs and utility bills. I said we could estimate, and then I don't remember what we were saying, only that we were saying it at the tops of our lungs.

We pulled into Eastern Buffet's parking lot, still yelling at each other, and stayed in the car a few minutes to continue our ranting and arm waving. At the peak of the argument, we were suddenly interrupted by a siren. An ambulance screeched to a halt in front of the restaurant, and two medical workers jumped out and ran through the doors. Without missing a beat, Eric said,

"So, Applebee's, then?"

We laughed. We roared. The absurdity of the ambulance cracked the tension, and the fight was quite over. We went to Applebee's and ate nachos. We did not work on a budget.

After that, we went out and bought the CD-ROM drive. Came home, and Eric set to work on the Mac. He booted from the System Install disk, went online to find an old version of Norton Utilities, unstuffed the package with utilities found on an ancient Zip disk backup of his old Macintosh Performa, and is still fixing problems as we speak. I'm in awe of his resourcefulness, sometimes, though I wish he'd quit saying that I was the one who "hosed the drive." I just happened to be the one using it; it most certainly was due to nothing I did! I think...