When Your Home Becomes the Enemy

I live in a trailer called “sane” so the joke is that when you come in you are in “sane”.
Lately it has been a more chaotic level of in “sanity”. I don’t know why, but the house seems to have developed a bad case of the “I don’t works.”
Let’s start with the beginning, we love our coffee, and therefore we love our coffee pot. So when our dear caffeine distributer started taking forty minutes to make that rich tempting brew, we were devastated. We tried to baby it along but that only lasted a few days, then it died. We were in shock, we were in mourning, and we were without coffee. We left it on the counter a few days, just hoping it would somehow revive itself. It didn’t, so we bought a new coffee pot. The new coffee pot lasted less than a week, and then it just couldn’t keep up with two caffeine addicts. It died, and we didn’t mourn that lazy inferior counter waster. Luckily, a friend had an old coffee pot in storage. By old I mean the clock on it had to be wound by hand. My husband remembered his mother having the same kind about twenty years ago. Life made sense again, and we had our Java fix once more….
I like the modern convenience of hot water, I bet you do too. There is nothing like going to the sink to wash your hands and working up a nice warm lather then… Aha! I bet you know what the next defector was. I have a large hot water heater. It is stuck in the back corner of my closet, just behind the shower of the bathroom. It is usually well behaved, giving a long hot shower, a full bath tub, or enough water to get the dishes clean. But something happened and then the shower got cold too fast. Just like that the hot water began to run out unexpectedly. Then it began to hiss at night. Not that I could hear it much over the noise of the furnace.
So one the day it would give no more hot water, (also the day to do laundry) we called the plumber.
“Here’s your problem, a burned out element. They do that with all this hard water. You should have no problem now. Here is your bill.”
For fifty dollars an hour, you would have thought it would be fixed. I did. I was wrong. Before the laundry and dishes and showers were caught up, it died again. “It’s the element again, and the pipe going into the heater is leaking. Once I replace that pipe that musty smell should go away. And here is your bill.”
Musty smell, Oh No!!! Yep, you guessed it, that stupid hot water heater left us a new problem to face. Now I like to read. I like to knit. So turning a house into a sauna (complete with steamed residents) is a disaster of gigantic proportions. Books and yarn seem to gather any moisture anyway, but when you combine a house sealed up to avoid the northwest winter, and a leaking hot water heater, you can imagine the headaches, not to mention the dishes, laundry, and unwashed teenagers.
Do you have teenagers? I do. If you have teenagers, and especially boys, you know the importance of a working video game system. In the dead of winter, the PS2 decides to stop reading disks. It could have stopped altogether, but no. It decided to continue to turn on, show the memory cards, it just wouldn’t read disks. No amount of coaxing would make that thing do what it was supposed to do… namely relieve the teenagers of being bored for about six hours a day. Now I know that growing boys could be sent out “to play”. You remember out to play, tag, hide and seek, and other knee-skinning activities. These are things of the past, besides, what are the middle aged games addicted parents supposed to do? I am not about to go out “to play” when all I want is to finish that Tiger Woods 2005 PGA tournament. How rude for that system to die when I have two days left.
This is where I mention that I am married for the second time. The important part is that the first husband, the Ex, has the boys’ second home. Like any two home family, there are spare game systems. So by the next visitation the house, once again had a working PS2. Thank you very much for coffee and controllers, and hot water.
So of course when we think things are back to normal, yeah okay in “sane” is normal to us. There is an appliance on the counter in the kitchen. It is not as important as the almighty coffee pot, but it does serve a purpose. It is, or was called a microwave. Now it is the source of home pyrotechnics. It used to heat water for tea. It used to make instant oatmeal. It really was appreciated for those eight minute baked potatoes. Then of course there were the hot dogs, left-overs, and the soup for the sick so lovingly heated. But alas the microwave has decided to die. And now we use a tea pot for hot water and the oven, that thing that usually holds a turkey twice a year. You never know what a good friend a microwave is until you have to wait a whole hour for a baked potato.
So just a review, with coffee, without microwave, with PS2 and hot water. Not bad, we can survive. I will just pop a movie in the
VCR while the potato bakes. I will sip my coffee and forget about the plumbing bills while I watch….My VCR eat my favorite tape! Stupid thing could eat the previews that nobody likes anyway; it has to eat the middle of the tape. And to be completely moronic, it works in fast-forward and reverse, without sound of course, but when you try to play…You could build a city for the Eskimos with all the snow. Now I like my movies. I have a VHS tape collection of about seven hundred movies. Most of them aren’t even on DVD yet. So there they sit mocking me because I can’t watch them.
At least there is the computer. I have grown fond of the Sims 2 game. It is this oh so perfect world where the hot water heater does NOT break and if the coffee pot does, I can fix it myself. They aren’t VCR’s, but nothing is that perfect.
Did I mention the computer…? The computer that decided to die. And it had to die on the very day that one of the teenagers got a new game to install on it. Ex-husband to the rescue again. It is amazing how persuasive a teenager with a new game can be. It helped that his father owed him a late Christmas gift, and the income tax return arrived. So the computer was bought, and the game installed. We have spent many blissful hours pretending that whole houses don’t break.
So I mention that the hot water heater’s near death experience held up the dishes, laundry, and bathing. So there were more clothes to wash that smelled of teenage sweat. The washing machine decided to join the other traitorous appliances. Why is it that anything that fills with water dies while full? I called around, and tried to find out what to do. Apparently the only way to deal with a dead washing machine mid cycle is to take out the clothes, wring them out by hand, and bail out the rest of the water.
Really, Bail, That’s it! I can’t believe that a machine that over flows, and leaks cannot drain if the engine dies. So that’s it we bail…wring out the clothes, and to the dryer they go.
Now washers and dryers are like those old married couples. They are always together, lovingly cleaning clothes side by side to the end. I am not surprised that the dryer died shortly thereafter. It just couldn’t go on long enough to finish that last load.
And then this morning as I was trying to figure out how to pay for another washer and dryer, the hot water heater made a loud crack, tripped the circuit breakers, and I am sure I will be seeing the plumber again real soon..
So I guess we’ll survive. I for one am not taking as much for granted, and looking forward to summer, because when you go fishing, and I like fishing, you don’t take anything that needs electricity. My advice is when your house becomes the enemy, go fishing….