Lamb and Frog

Apparently when you live in a high-humidity area or have evaporative cooling. In my case, it’s normally the latter, but lately it’s been both. In case you thought that my technology woes had come to an end, rest assured, that’s not the case. The refrigerator stopped working on Friday, July 3rd. You know…Friday afternoon right before the holiday weekend and right after we had just filled it with $500 worth of groceries. Fortunately 1) the freezer was still working; 2) we have another full-size refrigerator freezer in the garage that mostly just holds beer beverages; and 3) Bill wasn’t real cranky about it. As a matter of fact, he just moved what needed to be moved into the auxiliary fridge, unloaded the freezer side of the broken one, diagnosed the problem (ice blocking air ducts or something), and fixed it (with a blow dryer, minimal mess, and virtually no food loss). Turns out that, in high humidity, when you open the door of even a frost-free freezer condensation can build up on some of the metal parts. When you close the door the condensation turns to ice. When enough ice builds up, cold air from the freezer doesn’t get blown in to cool the fridge and all hell breaks loose. Who knew?

Of course, the engine light in the VW has come on twice since my last report too. Once right after the report and once a little less than a week after I had the codes cleared to turn it off. I give up on that. I’ve reverted to my long-range plan (on which I must remain silent). It also got a dead-battery after something got left on (I think) and I didn’t drive it for three days. I took Bill to the airport Sunday afternoon and didn’t get back in it until Wednesday. Dead as a doornail. Had to drive the RMT to pick up something way cool I bought on Craig’s List (pictures forthcoming). Put the stupid POS on the battery charger and that’s fixed now too.

My desktop computer has also been kind of twitchy. This morning, twitchy turned into blue screen of death (registry error) and a perpetual cycle of trying to re-start Windows (and just how long is it before the debut of Windows 7?…my conspiracy theory is alive and well…although I really think it was either a spybot problem or a conflict between some Yahoo! applications and Bing). I also managed to fix that without any major heartburn (and only one cup of coffee). Can Mercury be in retrograde forever? Or is someone just really abusing the dark side of the force?

Bill came home to find the pool funky (I forgot to check the chlorine level) and the swamp cooler in need of repair (it was making a lot of noise that I apparently could not hear over the screaming ceaseless sounds of joy emanating from my children). He’s in the process of draining the pool and he’s on the roof fixing the swamper now. It’s hot outside and hotter on the roof (he’s already mentioned that he prefers the dry 106 in Vegas to our 80+ with high humidity ). He’s a super guy. I’m not just saying that either. Guess what I had for breakfast? In-N-Out Burger! Dude bought me one yesterday, put it in his hotel fridge, and then brought it through airport security in his laptop bag so I could eat it this morning! What a man! I was so grateful I split it with him. He brought chocolate too. In-N-Out Burger with a chocolate chaser. Now that’s what I call ‘Breakfast of Champions’!

Update

Now Bill and John (the next door neighbor) are both on the roof. A bolt rusted and sheared off. Not good. I just took the tap and die set up the ladder. Meanwhile, the entire ‘popsicle crew’ (my two kids, John’s two kids, and the kid from down the street) is in John’s house unsupervised (heh, heh, heh).