It’s been a rough week at the Elliott-Hannon household. Murphy’s Law, (which says that if anything can go wrong, it will) was in full force. And it was all mechanically related.
Last weekend, when the temperatures were in the 20s, the heater suddenly stopped heating. Ironically, the air conditioning worked quite nicely. I spent the next couple of days in my big chair, wrapped in blankets, with one heating pad, and two dogs as leg warmers.
If you are familiar with the band “Three Dog Night”, you probably know that their name comes from exactly such a situation. It is an Australian term that means a night is so cold that you need to sleep with three dogs to keep warm. The Aborigines of that country crawl into a hole in the ground and cuddle up with their dogs. Although one of our dogs is dubbed the “Dingo,” we decided that digging holes would not help much. The heating pad, and a small cat, served as the third dog.
Our friend, Paul Hebert, came over Monday, jiggled a few wires, and voilà, we had heat. I do not want to suggest that Chris and I are not very handy around the house, but we have had a light bulb broken off in the fixture for about two years now.
Chris swears he will sign up for the Life Enrichment class on Basic Home Maintenance. I believe that class has started without him.
I am leading a Life Enrichment class about the Mystique of New Orleans, a city I love. This class will focus on one of my other loves, the paranormal. This should be a piece of cake (King Cake) for me. Right? No, wrong. After I had written about six pages of lecture notes for the first class, the computer died a tragic death.
Of course, few computers could have survived the generous shower of cold milk that ours experienced. At first, things seemed to be OK. Before long, the letters “c” and “z” stopped working. Then, the ability to capitalize was gone. Then, (horrors of horrors!) all my work disappeared into the ether. Yes, I actually cried.
My husband and I come from a resilient sort of people. Surely a few mechanical glitches are something we can handle. Well, on the other hand, perhaps not.
We did purchase a new computer that seemed to be pre-loaded with a horde of gremlins who refused to acknowledge the Internet. Every time we tried to do research, a message appeared that said, “page cannot be displayed.” I have no idea why. Chris is trying, calmly, to handle that with AT&T. However, it is not yet resolved.
This has been a week of hard lessons. Here are a few:
n Evidently, only a trained heating and air conditioning professional can jiggle a wire.
n If there is a deadline for work and research, the computer will rebel.
n Crying is ineffective in repairing mechanical things.
This may not have been one of my most upbeat columns. But, aren’t you all relieved that I didn’t write about Whitney Houston?
(Happy Mardi Gras to all my New Orleans friends and those who are New Orlenians by proxy.)
Adele Elliott, a New Orleans native, moved to Columbus after Hurricane Katrina. Email reaches her at [email protected].
Adele Elliott, a New Orleans native, moved to Columbus after Hurricane Katrina.
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