One damn thing after another...or so it seems with the preposterous leader...if not our enemy Canada or the pretense of a nuclear disarmament, then it's tearing children from their adults. The end of the world--as we know it!
Such were my preoccupations when one damn thing after another started up at home. Of course, it is embarrassing to be preoccupied by the mundane when the world is shuddering for fear of what might come next. But there you are. Several electric sockets have gone kaput in our household; the ones that feed the coffee maker, the toaster, the dishwasher, and one air conditioner. The remedy so far promised is a rip down of various kitchen walls of plaster and lathe in our hundred-year old building.
And then.. having lived in NYC for 55 years: for the first time, an elevator I was on stopped in mid-travels. I was astonished. After the fact, I am still surprised I didn't go bonkers (claustrophobia and all that). A strange calm came on. Studying the remedies offered on the control panel, I pushed the button that said phone. Of course, I got an answering machine at the repair company. Scratch that. Then I pressed the "alarm" button. Quite loud. Soon the voice of a neighbor promising to seek help. Thank you. I decided to not go into action whatever that might entail, but to sit on the floor, cross my legs, breathe deeply and say a Hail Mary. I was in no danger, I told myself. Something would happen...even if the oxygen ran out! Really it turned out to be only fifteen minutes...one of the men in the building arrived with a crow bar, pried open the door, and thank yous all around. Neighbor happy to see me alive! Me happy to be breathing! Etc. So, here's to the mundane, at least for today.
Let's hear it for men with crowbars! Glad you came through it okay.
ReplyDeleteWe're having our own electrician adventure. Our oven died about two months ago. Our house is about 60 years old, which means the kitchen is the size that used to prevail. So our oven was just a single oven, i.e. not one of those fancy-schmancy two-oven arrangements. So when the oven died and then defeated the efforts of the oven-repair outfit and the handyman outfit to resuscitate it, we went to the local appliance superstore, only to discove that fancy-schmancy two-oven arrangements are virtually all that's offered for sale these days, if, like ours, the cooking range is a separate unit. But there was precisely one single oven on offer for sale, so we bought it. It was scheduled to be delivered in about 10 days, so for 10 days we limped along with the range top, the microwave, the outdoor grill and an old toaster oven that my wife retrieved from the garage.
Then the appliance store informed us that the oven was on back order.
Then, earlier, this week, the installers came out to install the oven, but couldn't because our electric isn't up to code (a previous owner was a do-it-yourselfer whose little shortcuts and illegal corner-cutting has cost me a fortune in electrician and plumbing bills over the years). So then today the electricians came out and determined that we need an entire new circuit breaker panel. No walls ripped out yet, but it could very well be coming.
In the mean time, we're discovering that the toaster oven actually does the job about 80% of the time. I don't think we could roast a turkey, but we could probably do a chicken. Can't fit a cookie sheet in it but a 9x9 pan fits just fine.
Btw, regarding our enemy Canada: my grandfather who immigrated here from Belgium a century or so ago, and as was common of immigrants of that period became a flag-waving super-patriot, could never understand why the US didn't just invade Canada. So many natural resources, so few people to defend them.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you better keep your grandfather's strategy quiet!
ReplyDeleteGlad the elevator incident came out okay. Home repair and maintenance problems are a pain. We had to have new living room windows put in this winter. And there's always ongoing plumbing issues. The former owner of our house was an electrical engineer. So electricity is up to snuff. But he shouldn't have tried to jerry-rig plumbing.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it nice to have solvable problems? We needed an electrician Monday to unscramble somebody's idea of wiring to make the garbage disposal work. I was visualizing multi-hundred dollars, but he did it for a service charge.
ReplyDeleteI wish there was only a service charge for electric sockets in a hundred year old building that has had umpteen more sockets added in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteAs described to me (an electrical ignoramus) the return wire in the socket (at one end of the apartment) seems to be missing. How? Where? Who took it?
At the other end a box (probably hidden somewhere in the wall) probably has a loose wire. Can't look for that! Bring in new line (hence digging through wall and ceiling). It is said there is no relationship between the socket at one end and the sockets at the other end...even though they went kaput in the same week. Expect me to believe that???
And we don't even have a garbage disposal!
Then there is the type of wiring in some old houses where they just string more extension cords, tape them over door frames and run them where they need them. Until the circuit is overloaded and it blows the fuse.
DeleteNo chance of suffocating in an elevator. Lots of air circulation with the elevator shaft. Doesn't help the claustrophobia though.
ReplyDeleteWe seem to be moving in some kind of Amish direction. As appliances break, Raber insists we can get along without them, so no more dishwasher, washer and dryer, or central air.
ReplyDeleteHope the plumbing doesn't die!
I could do without the dishwasher, but not the clothes washer. Central air would be hard to be without also. I have much less tolerance of heat than I used to.
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