Today was one of those days. The morning was somewhat frantic, mostly at my urging — I wanted Jeffrey to practice his spelling before going to school, and that made for a very rushed end-of-morning. He made it with seconds to spare, and then I walked back home, got into the car, and drove to work, ready to battle my Windows 2000 installation.

At which point I discovered I’d carefully forgotten to put my briefcase and my exercise clothes in the car, so I didn’t have my laptop, and so I wasn’t going to make any progress on Windows 2000 today.

I should have taken that as a hint and gone home. But I knew there were other things I could accomplish at work, so I stayed.

Well, I did get my desk partially clean, dumping weeks worth of trade rags and filing the receipts for my last expense account.

But I think my level of incompetence was contagious today — even the good folks in the mailroom were infected; I gave them a fax to send to England, and they faxed it to me at my eFax number instead (which was the “from” fax number on the note). Fortunately, I saw the fax arrive a few minutes later and quickly had them send it to the right number, but I’ve never seen them do anything like that before!

The rest of the day passed in much the same way. I left early, hopefully before I caused any permanent damage or ticked anyone off for life — my mood was as bad as my productivity today.

So after dinner, I went to Fry’s to buy a 10/100 switch for my home LAN and a 6-pack of Diet Coke for my office. How hard could it be? Finding the switch was easy; there was only one person ahead of me at the register; things were looking up. But then the cashier couldn’t find the rebate form — it took two people to find it (it was misfiled). And the Diet Coke rang up at the wrong price, and I was irritated enough to make them void the sale and do it again (Fry’s doesn’t have cash registers you can see, so you can’t tell what price you’ve been charged until you get the receipt; by that time, they’ve put in your credit card, and so they have to void the sale if there’s a problem (even though you haven’t signed the receipt)), even though it was not a signficant amount of money.

But the switch seems to work. So now when I have to copy files among the various computers at the house, it should be quicker. Will I ever save as much time as I spent buying the switch? Probably not, but at least I don’t have to be ashamed of my slow 10-megabit home network anymore, at least not until my friends have Gigabit Ethernet.

None of you have Gigabit Ethernet, do you?

Well, I had my MRI; results are due in two days (but I’m not going to hold my breath — last time, it took over a week). It was slightly less fun than last time; I guess the novelty wore off quickly. The only really bad part was needing to scratch and not being able to do so except between scans — as far as room went, I think I’ve been in tighter middle seats on airplanes — and the MRI place wasn’t trying to serve me lousy food.

I continue to build up my “new” laptop from work; it’s so much fun re-installing Microsoft Office and the service packs on yet another machine. I’ve gotten better at it; this time, I wrote down my serial number so that I didn’t have to fire up Word to get it before installing service pack 2a. I should have downloaded more of the software I need yesterday while at work instead of doing it from home — downloading 430MB takes a while.

And Hebrew School started today. Jeffrey is as thrilled about going as I was when I was his age. And he gets just as much choice in the matter as I did. I think his class (and teacher) is far better than what I had, but I just don’t think it’s ever going to be on the top of his list of things to do. Not unless they start reading Hebrew comic books instead of the Siddur, anyway.