WHEN THINGS GO WRONG ...

...it seems to be all at once.  For example, just the other day, I had a phone call from my credit card company.  It appears that a large sum had been charged to my card at a Walgreen’s in Arkansas.  Was it mine?  Good grief, NO.  I’m lucky! That charge had been made earlier in the day, and the credit card company had caught it. They would not charge my account. Did I want to cancel the current card, and have them issue me a new one? Absolutely! I pay a small sum each month for this service, and it had just paid for itself several times over.

So what else went wrong? We have an electric water heating unit in the kitchen that is great for making tea or coffee very quickly. The temperature of the water is close to boiling. But what Cliff served me at lunch was a long way from boiling – – it was quite cold. Was the unit failing? But then we found that the dishwasher didn’t work, either. Then Cliff told me that the light in the refrigerator needed replacing. And when when a couple of items in the den on the same circuit didn’t work, I started to suspect that we were having an electrical problem. Cliff checked the circuit breakers, but none of them were off. Uh, oh! This did not sound good. We had a neighbor come by, and he helped Cliff move the refrigerator so that it could be unplugged and re-plugged on a circuit that worked. I phoned Ben, my favorite repair man, and he came out the following day. He spent all morning trying to locate the problem, and it was not until shortly after lunch that he came to tell me that he thought he had discovered the difficulty. It seems that there was a very slow leak from the kitchen drain. Water had gotten into a junction box under the house, slowly eroding the electrical wires, which finally broke. The piece of water pipe had a crack in it, and had to be replaced. And the wiring in the junction box had to be repaired of course. He spent the rest of the day getting that done.

 So that took care of that problem, but that was not the end of it. The next was relatively minor. Some of the fluorescent tubes on the porch had burned out, so Ben purchased some new ones. However, work time had run out. He will be back in a day or two to install the new bulbs.

 Well! That took care of those problems, but was that the end of it?  Hah! While Ben was doing the repair work under the house, he had to turn off the electricity, so I could not use the computer. When power was restored, I went to check my email and discovered that my monitor would not turn on. This monitor is only a year old! Cliff and I fussed with it for a while, and finally got it going. There was one other minor problem on the computer, but we finally got that fixed, too. Quite a day! We survived. And now everything is back to normal – or what we call normal around here.  We shouldn’t have any more problems for at least a week.

Humor –