Well, not exactly, and actually, it may last at least through Wednesday.

Things started off okay. It was actually kinda pleasant even, because there were thunderstorms overnight — thunderstorms! Which can’t happen when it’s freezing cold. So that meant, you know, the weather was on the upswing and all that. Sort of. Well, you know, striving to be spring. With flood warnings and everything. And it was nice, in a funny sort of way, to wake up (even in the darkness of the brutal early mornings that are my lot until, oh, 2016) with driving rain and flashing lightning and whatnot.

I drove the manchild down to wait for the bus (because it was really, really pouring and I have a heart). When we walked into the garage, weather had changed so dramatically somehow that there was condensation everywhere, and it smelled like wet. The day started fine with plenty of coffee. I was getting tons done. I made all my lists on schedule for the morning meeting with Shelly to plan out our specific action items for the week, getting Stringtopia really rolling. Snowballing, even. We had a great meeting and things were all on track. We even stole a few moments to chat about the kids and the junior high band concert tonight and schedules of that ilk, and there were Girl Scout cookies, so how bad could it possibly be?

I made it back in time for lunch with my better half. A quick, 20-minute lunch, sure, but c’mon, that’s always a win. And afterwards, I walked out on the front porch to see how wet things looked out there what with flood warnings in effect, and that’s when I saw this.

That made me so cheerful I totally took a cameraphone picture and posted it to Facebook and got all enthused.

And then I walked inside, and up the stairs to my office, where I was greeted by

So then I spent about an hour doing all the usual things a recovered sysadmin would do when presented with that — like also posting that picture to Facebook to counterbalance that happy hopeful bulb poking up, and then further chronicling how

and everything that goes with that, like having the conversation about how I only have a Windows box in case of a dire need to indulge in some gaming, and that’s a much more legitimate reason than “I need it for QuickBooks and syncing my Blackberry.”

To my credit, I only screwed around with it for an hour before heading to MicroCenter and

coming back with a Windoze upgrade that I knew was coming down the pike, and that old standard, the 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda in $whatever_size_is_on_sale. I had just enough time to pull all the other drives, give the box a once-over with the canned air, shove the new drive in there, shove the Windows 7 Professional 64-bit whatever bla bla bla DVD in the DVD drive, boot, start the install, and leave to go pick up the manchild from his after-school writing thing. And then homework and the mail and dinner and trash day and more poking new Windows with a stick and cursing at it and making sure the band outfit was good to go and piling in the truck and a band concert (which was quite good, let’s hear it for music education) and you know, so much for my list of things I was definitely going to have done today.

Today was perhaps not entirely my day.

Here’s hoping for tomorrow.