Life Inside the Accelerated Entropy Field
Everything inside and outside my house has been going to hell in a very large handbasket for the past couple of weeks, and that process seems to have speeded up since I returned home last Saturday. Here's a list:
Saturday: the dryer in the basement started leaking water from its vent all over the floor, so I disassembled the whole shebang, cleaned out the ducts, and reassembled everything with hose clamps. Later in the day, my son slid into a curb while driving his mother's car in the snow. Afterwards, we noticed a serious shimmy in the front-end, so I took it to the shop this morning. Prognosis: the impact split the bead of the left-front tire, rendering the car totally unsafe to drive. We were extremely lucky that we didn't have a blow-out while driving it this weekend. Cost: $270
Sunday: the high-water alarm in the lift tank of my septic system went off. This can mean one of two things, either the sump pump is broken, in which case my basement was about to be flooded with backed-up sewage, or else the float switch got stuck in the freezing cold. In order to find out what was really going on, I had to pry up the 100-lb concrete cover off the lift tank and hang over the edge of a 15-ft shaft with a long copper rod while inhaling large amounts of poo gas, while slowly getting frostbite due to the 5-degree temperatures outside yesterday. Fortunately, it appears that the switch was just stuck. Nevertheless, I decided to play it safe and had my septic tank pumped today. Cost: $100
Today: the power supply in my son's computer ah-sploded with a very loud bang this afternoon. It was filled with dust, so I imagine that a capacitor overheated and blowed up real good. I had a spare supply on hand, but the wires to the motherboard connector were too short, so I had to drive to Radio Shack, pick up a bag of butt connectors (huh-huh, I said "butt connectors"), and splice in longer wires to make it fit. Cost: $3.98
Still unresolved is the mystery of the disappearing mouse in my son's room. We discovered large piles of droppings behind his computer desk, but no holes or nests. The 3 traps baited with peanut butter remain unsprung.
Blogging? [sigh] Yeah, I'll get back to it someday. I should have plenty of time when my family and I move into the Red Cross shelter after a freak winter tornado sends our house off to Oz.