We knew it was going to happen. In the front of my brain it was inevitable. But in the back of my brain where all my secret desires and my belief that I am immune to the foibles of the real world live, I harbored the faith that my computer would be perfectly immune from the extreme environment where we now live. Alas, it is not so.

It all started with my hard drive. One day it just went toes up. No warnings, no symptoms, just no worky. This is not as tragic as it sounds, since my very smart husband built my computer with mirrored drives in a RAID array. God bless him. So the master of my data and god of all things electronic just pulled the non-functioning drive and my system boots normally from the remaining drive with all my bits intact. He is now extremely zealous about backing up my data across the network every day while we figure out what to do about getting a replacement matched drive.

My speakers, well they have been sort of a problem since the beginning. I have an amazing set of JBL Creature speakers that put out monster sound, all from two tiny speakers on my desk, barely 2 ½ inches tall – well, those and the sub woofer under my desk. They don't have a volume knob. Instead they have these clever little static doohickys. You just touch a contact and the static from your body raises or lowers the volume. That was the coolest thing ever when we lived in climate control with grounded plugs. But in salty humidity and Mexican wiring, not so much.

At first, I could still change the volume if I plugged them into a laptop, which runs off a battery, and I guess somehow circumvents that grounding thing, or if I touched something else metal at the same time, but no longer. Thankfully, I still have software control over the volume, so it's not a huge deal. And the speakers still rock!

This morning, my computer just went nuts. Resource usage went through the roof. My music kept cutting in and out, and I couldn't even move my mouse because the system was so busy. At times like this I tend toward freak out mode (after all, my computer is my source of email, internet, music, television, amusement, and, oh yeah, my income. In other words my lifeline and more important to me than the blood that runs through my veins. Can you hear the panic creeping in?), but I try to play it cool.

"um, Hon? Can you take a look at my resource usage real quick?"

I hear the tippy tippy tap of his keyboard coming from the other room and a wary, "Why?"

"oh, nothing, really. My music keeps cutting out, and I can't close anything. Just thinking there might be a problem."

Silence. Then lots of tippy tippy tap. Finally, he instructs me to log out of my session and hit ctrl+alt+backspace to restart X.

I faithfully follow his instructions. No improvement. I follow more instructions while he monitors everything from his computer. No improvement. He sighs, comes into the room and tells me to shut down.

Shut down? Oh no! That can mean only one thing: surgery. I watch in silent horror as he unplugs all of my cables and carries my machine away to the operating theater.

I stand watching while he unscrews the case and removes the cover. I want to ask questions, but I know that this is not a good time. So I try really, really hard to be quiet. It doesn't take him long at all to locate the problem. My video card. There is a picture of it at the top of the page. Just in case you are wondering, the capacitors should not look all puffy and exploded like that. If you click on the photo, you will get a bigger one.

I'm thinking oh, no, not my video card! Anything but the video card! (ok, not the motherboard either.) But my video card is special. It's not just any crappy card. It has all the cool stuff I need like a half a gig of on-board, dedicated memory and a really neat cooling system. It has a fancy chip and everything. I need my video card. After all, I am a designer, and I do all sorts of graphics work. (It's pretty darn cool for video games, too.) We couldn't even walk into a store and buy that card in the US. We had to special order it. And now we are in Mexico! (Hear that panic again?)

My beloved is cool, calm, and collected. And silent. I hate that. He is opening up the other machines in the house: the server, the media computer, the spare, even his own precious machine (if that's not true love, I don't know what is), taking inventory and evaluating the contents for suitability of temporary replacement parts for my computer.

I am following him around in that jittery way that says I am either very anxious or I really have to go to the bathroom. And the dogs are following me. So Chuck is trying to resuscitate my machine while trailing a veritable posse everywhere he goes. And not showing a single iota of irritation.

I finally, valiantly decide that if I truly cared for him, I would get out his hair and quit hovering, so I went to the kitchen to do dishes. It turns out time flies even when you are not having fun, because no sooner did I get the sink full of soapy water (ok, we have really low water pressure and it takes awhile, but still) he was calling to me to tell me my machine was up and running. Woo Hoo!

So here I sit in front of my resurrected machine, happily typing this post, but still not quite at peace. That back part of my brain where the faith lived has been fully quashed, the front part of my brain victorious, waiting for the next thing.