Thursday, April 03, 2008

No good deed goes unpunished, or why bad things happen to good people

Back from Spring Break - and I have a headache.

The beach was nice - pretty good weather, very windy and cool most days. It was really nice to see Robin and Beverly - they caught me up on all the gossip.

Dusty enjoyed the beach - until Wednesday evening. Over the last few weeks, he's been growling at mom at random times, mostly when she was walking in the hall or into the kitchen. He gave out mixed signals - wagging his tail while growling, and then wanting to sit next to her on the couch. On Wednesday night, as mom was coming to the dinner table, Dusty growled, barked, and bit. I threw him out on the deck and called local animal control. Needless to say, Dusty is still at the beach. So, we are once again dog-less. I don't think I'm going to adopt another dog from a shelter. We were lucky with Lady and Missy, but I'm not keen on taking a chance again unless the shelter knows a dog's history.

On Monday, my last day of break, my computer started acting squirrelly. The display was turning a pretty shade of fuchsia, and jumping around like a bad TV picture. I shut it down, and toted it over to the computer geeks in town. The guy plugged it into another monitor, and the picture seemed fine. But (and lately, there's always a but), an error message started popping up about corrupt files. Uh - oh...that's never good. Sure enough, it looks like my hard drive is going bad. To send the laptop off for repairs on the display and a new hard drive would cost upward of $500, and take several weeks. I have two UOP classes going on, and a new one starting this week. If I have to cancel the one just starting, (because I have no access to my laptop for several weeks) it's going to cost me around $900. So, net cost of fixing the computer = $1400. No brainer - I ask the geeks to order me a new laptop. The new computer should be in today - in the meantime, I'm facilitating my 3 classes from my school computer. There goes some of the Germany money!!

On the same day, after coming back from the geeks, I realize the refrigerator is not cooling. Not only that, everything is melting in the freezer. Wonderful... I spend the late part of the evening transferring things out of the inside fridge/freezer to the garage fridge/freezer. Luckily, the thing is still under warranty.

Also, several weeks ago, the garage door stopped working right. Repair parts were ordered, and the garage door guy came yesterday morning to fix it. Yesterday afternoon, the fridge guy came to look at the fridge. Do we have a working garage door and refrigerator today? Nope.

For some reason, only one guy came to install the parts in the garage door. He arrived about 10:30, and was still there when I came home to meet the fridge guy at 1:00. He rang the doorbell about an hour later, and said he couldn't get things to work. He'll have to come back. Sometime. In the meantime, he disengaged the opener mechanism, so we can't use the garage door at all. We're parking outside.

The fridge guy diagnosed the problem with the refrigerator. Motor burned out in the fan that blows the cool air all around the freezer and refrigerator. Usually, he keeps that part in his truck. Not today. He'll have to come back. Sometime. In the meantime, we're using the refrigerator and the big freezer in the garage.

Ok - here's the good thing: ( I had to think pretty long and hard...) Since no one can open our garage door right now, our food stored in the garage freezer and refrigerator is safe.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've always heard that bad things come in threes, so once three bad things had happened I could kind of took a deep breath and relax. But your experience shows that bad things can come in fours (door, Dusty, freezer, computer), and my trust in the order of the universe is now being tested.