Tired of Things Breaking

Good morning, blog readers. Thursday is my day to post here. Looks as if I'm on schedule. But, I won't be posting on my writing blog tomorrow, as is my schedule. Why? It's broken.

You might say that's an odd way to describe a blog, but it's the only work I can think of right now. In fact, it seems that many things I use or rely on are broken at the moment. Some I've written about before, and you could find their stories in blog archives. Since 2010 we've had a series of appliances go bad. One of them, the dishwasher, is holding on. The little door that's supposed to open part way through the wash/rinse cycle won't stay shut. Hence, all our soap goes out in the first wash cycle. The second cycle will be just water. So are our dishes getting clean? They seem to be, but replacing the dishwasher is a proposition measured in a couple of years, not a decade.

I have trees around the house that are broken, in the sense that they need maintenance. I need to contact the tree service we used a few years back and get them out again. A four hundred dollar bill gone. One tree really is broken. It's a dead tree, and I was cutting on it have it make a controlled fall away from the house. Alas, when it was cut much of the way through the wind took it right toward the house. Fortunately it got hung up on another tree. I guess the tree service can get it down too. The septic tank hasn't been pumped for around eight or ten years. It's an oversized tank considering two people live in a four bedroom house, without much company, so we should be able to go a long time. However, there's another three or four hundred soon to depart from my bank account.

But more important than these: My desktop computer is in the shop. It runs on XP, and once Microsoft stopped supporting XP, things started to go bad. Not with typing, using Word or other programs residing on the hard drive. Suddenly no browsers would work. I could still connect to the Internet, because I could access Dropbox, uploading and downloading files there. But web browsing was gone. That meant I couldn't use it to get to either of my blogs, and thus my schedule for blogging would be difficult to keep.

That actually happened shortly before we made our road trip to the east, the night before I think. I put it out of my mind, thinking it was a temporary glitch. When we got back after seven days it still wasn't working. Now it's in the shop, in the queue, waiting it's turn for an OS upgrade and other tune-up activities. Had I known right away it was something that needed work on, I could have taken it in that last day and had it back when we returned. Alas, I wish I'd have thought of that.

What's wrong with my other blog I don't know. It's the entire website, actually, not just the blog. I can see the pages, though at the top of each page is an error line. But I can't log-in to do any work on it or to make a blog post. I was about to upgrade it to the latest Wordpress version. I'm actually only one minor version behind. I also needed to upgrade my theme to the latest version available. But if I can't log-in.... I suppose I'll need to contact Wordpress somehow. I'm not looking forward to it. Not sure why, but I'm just not. I might have a little free time this afternoon to do it, after I teach my noon class.

So all these broken or nearly broken or maintenance requiring things are weighing heavily on me. Maintenance for the homeowner is nothing new. I put a little money away from each paycheck in a maintenance sinking fund, so I have the money available. Still, it's nice having those dollars swelling the bank account. Today or tomorrow I should get the computer back. Next week I think will be the trees. After that will be another stab at the toilet mechanism. Oh, did I not mention that, no matter what I do or how I maintain it, something is always going wrong with the toilet in the master bath?