Oct 27 2009
Imps abound (the war begins)
I know it has been months since I have posted anything and I apologize to everyone who reads my ramblings. My creative juices seem to stop flowing when my chickens are forced to stay cooped, and I started a job where I was working 14 hours a day 7 days a week so I barely had time to bathe, eat, and sleep. During the time I was working 95 hours a week it seemed like everything I owned either fell apart or stopped working.
I stumbled into the bathroom at 5 am one morning and found myself standing in a puddle…a tiny trail of water was creeping out from under my washer. After rubbing and blinking my eyes into focus…with no caffeine intake this took a minute…I began the investigation. It turned out that the hose had rusted where it attached to the water valve. In my attempt to tighten it to stop the leak, I managed to break it some more and in return received an unplanned cold shower. I stumbled out to the water meter and finally coaxed and cursed the valve into the off position. The only thing that saved me was that I had set the timer on my coffee pot the night before so it would be waiting for me when I got up. Since a shower was now out of the question…I had more time to relax and enjoy a whole cup before rushing out the door. My son came to my rescue…he cut the line and capped it off so I could have water again. The only problem was that now I only had hot water to my washer, so that meant washing my work clothes was now a much longer process. I had to fill the washer with hot water and let it sit until it cooled off…wash the clothes…take them out and pile them on the sink….fill the washer back up with hot water…let it cool (and it is amazing how long it takes water to cool off when you are waiting on it)…rinse the clothes, and then start the whole thing over. So, if I timed it right, I could finish a load every other day.
After a few days this began to fit into the flow of my life…but the appliance imps could not tolerate this and decided more chaos was called for.
While foraging in the fridge and coming to the realization that the slightly green tinted contents in the remaining container did not contain broccoli and therefore the resemblance to the fragmented florets meant that my repurposed plastic had become a habitat to a completely different botanical classification…I had to accept the fact that if I wanted to eat…I had to stay awake long enough to cook. This might not sound like a huge feat for most of you, but the fact that I have in the past fallen asleep while standing in the doorway…in the middle of a conversation…and slid almost all the way to the floor before waking up, made it a big deal for me! I decided that the quickest and easiest path to food would be to throw something in the oven while I did the laundry switch out process and showered. As I turned the knob to start the oven, the stove started beeping and flashing like I had set off a car alarm. I turned it off and on a few times in the hopes that it would shut up and work, but each time just yielded the same response. My frustration level rose with each turn of the knob, and I started pushing all the other buttons in a futile attempt to win the battle of woman verses machine. The stove retaliated by getting louder and changing the flashing message to read F1 over and over again. My dignified response was to start stomping my foot and screaming, “WELL F U 2!!!!”. The machine thought it had won, but at this point I pulled out my secret weapon. I stopped waving my finger in the air (which I had felt necessary to emphasize my ranting) and used it to flip the switch in the breaker box…a small victory in a war not yet won. I decided that what I had really wanted all along was the peanut butter jar and a spoon.
