The Aerie

Zoom

Here we are again in zoom-time. As I've mentioned before, sometimes work settles into a routine in which whole weeks pass unnoticed: hence the gap since my last post. This will continue for a few more weeks until my upcoming trip to Stockholm, and will resume thereafter until the summer evaporates.

It's been a busy couple of weeks. First the door fell off the refridgerator, then the firewall keeps clogging up and needing a reboot every couple of days, and now the coffeemaker has stopped making coffee. See to answer the question posed in "Rent," I measure a year in terms of things breaking around the house: "The toilet; the freezer; the gutter that's choked with garbage. The toaster; the windows; the lawn to be cut... How about CHO-O-O-OREs!"

Yes the other evening I returned home and my wife said "Could you take a look at the fridge, the door doesn't seem to be closing right." So I looked at the door and it fell off onto the floor. Well, just about. I discovered that a bolt had sheared through due to the weight of condiments stored in the door. As soon as I touched the broken bolt it fell out, and as soon as it fell out only one bolt was holding the bracket, so that started to turn downward and eventually the door came off.

I tried drilling a hole through the solid steel mounting bar, but all that did was deafen me and blunt one of my drill bits. So eventually I was forced to reverse which side the doors open on, since fridges are built to open from either side depending on how they are installed. The intervening week has been amusing as we all fumble absentmindedly at the wrong side before waking up and reaching across to open the door.

In the middle of fixing the fridge I sat on a panel at Hamline college explaining to very friendly but somewhat confused college students how one can be an atheist AND a Unitarian-Universalist at the same time. It was a very nice time, everyone was very friendly, and a good time was had by all. I worked on the fridge, spoke at a college, and then worked on the fridge again till about 11:30 p.m.

Today's breakdown was the coffee maker - purchased last September for my spouse's birthday, it has turned out to be a transgendered appliance. It began life as a coffeemaker, but deep down inside it has always known it was a humidifier. So today it finally got its hormones and scheduled its reassignment and has begun living its life as a humidifier: the water in the tank goes down, but instead of dripping through the grounds the spout releases only steam. Eight cups of water into steam in about twenty minutes - I think it is going to be very happy as a humidifier.

What else? Oh yeah, Stockholm. The training company is sending me to Stockholm the second week of May, which ought to be fun. Unlike England I don't speak the language, but I'm confident that my English will support my hand gestures and pointing in urban Stockholm. All I need is coffee and pastries and I'll be fine for the week.

And Saturday was my final class in my Build Your Own Major program, so I'm figuring I ought to get started on the actual project involved. Fortunately when we went through the "scheduling" exercise, I filled out "January, February: plan project; March, April: dawdle, prevaricate, delay, procrastinate; May: panic, weep, cram." So they can't say I didn't warn them.

So it's been a busy week, but that's no excuse for not updating the blog. Hopefully back in the habit now... that is, as long as my computer's DVD burner doesn't keep freezing the system when I use it...

Posted by Albatross at April 24, 2007 4:50 PM | TrackBack