It's Beginning To Look...

I can tell Christmas is coming soon. How you may ask? Well it seems to be a family curse. Mechanical problems happen right before Christmas.

Cars break down before Christmas. One year all cars went kablooey at the same time. My oldest son worked from early morning until afternoon on the east side of Detroit. My second son was driving truck and often left it in line so it would be the first when a plant opened in the morning. My third son had to come from a nearby suburb to work near where we lived. His wife worked in a different suburb in the opposite direction. My daughter worked in a suburb at the end of suburbia. I worked in another suburb near the end of suburbia.

There was one car running. My second son's wife who had three children to get to school was the de facto chauffeur. That poor thing was in the car from morning till night. I forgot to mention that we worked from around 4:00 AM to 3:00 the following AM.

Somehow for that almost week she managed to get all of us to work/school on time and then pick us up when our shifts were over. She seemed to love juggling all the schedules to deliver good service. It was a horror. Let me tell you we were happy to get our individual cars back.

It seems like each year there are car troubles. Even though we are driving better automobiles than we did back then the glitches still pop up right before Christmas.

Now it seems that the curse is spreading.

My computer said I needed to upgrade. I followed all the directions and waited. And waited. And waited. I had been having some minor annoyances and was anxious for them to be solved.

Unfortunately it was worse after the upgrade. It seemed like everything was trying to run in a molasses lake. Finally my computer froze.

I duly did a shut down. It would not come back up.

Thank goodness my son thinks solving problems like this is a fun challenge. But he was not having much success either. After a couple of days he was ready to throw up his hands and give up. He decided to completely re-install Windows to see if that would work.

It took him another day and a half to get it working. Now we are still finding things we need to load again but it seems to be working good anyway.

While he was busy working on my computer we started hearing strange noises from the furnace. After hours we heard a loud WHOOMPH. And the furnace worked no more.

It has been cold out. It will be slightly above freezing today but not so tomorrow.

We do have electrical space heaters to keep us warm but because under the house gets cold the floors get cold. And there is always the danger of the pipes freezing under the house.

It took a couple of days for the repairman to get to us. They have to come from a town about 25 miles from here. They already had repair jobs ahead of us. We were lucky they came as fast as they did.

He gave the furnace a good cleaning and it relit the first try. Bless his little heart.

He was a nice young man who showed us pictures of the dog his family took in. It had been physically and sexually abused. It is doing well now and is a beautiful animal. He was on his way to pick it up from the groomer when he left our house.

So now my house is comfy and warm. My computer is working as it should. Just remember that Christmas is coming.