The Fridge

I reckon it’s been about 2 months ago now that our refrigerator broke. To make a long story short, a technician came, diagnosed the problem, ordered parts, and the parts arrived several days later, but due to scheduling conflicts between me and the technician, the repair service got scheduled for 2 weeks later, and then, on the day he was to come, he didn’t show up, and I found out this piece of news when the day was half over and I had already missed most of my work day, that he had called in sick and there was no replacement to cover for him, so the repair appointment was rescheduled for one week later after we resolved our scheduling conflicts once again, and I arranged another day off,  and lo and behold, he came that time, on time, too, but then determined the fridge couldn’t be fixed after all, so he took the parts away, promised a refund via the mail, provided a $500 off coupon only good at Sears, which we went to on that Friday night, where we found a great fridge, bought it, and are awaiting the earliest delivery date available – one month to the day from when we bought it (gasps for air). During all this time, without a working fridge in the house, we used our second fridge, the beer fridge, located in the workshop, which was very inconvenient. Picture yourself, if you will, walking out your back door, going over to your neighbor’s house, walking into their kitchen, getting butter from the fridge, and then making the return trip back to your house, and you can begin to understand what a pain in the ass this was, and after three weeks of doing that to discover that the new fridge would not arrive for 30 more days, well, I told Brian I couldn’t do it anymore, would he bring the old fridge from the workshop and put it on the back deck, so at least, it would be a shorter trip, but it is still a pain in the ass, and we are still weeks away from resolving the fridge dilemma. And, that is all I’m going to say about that.

Work

Recently, my co-worker, work partner, the one who covered my job for me and me for her, submitted her resignation so she could work full-time for her husband’s company. We determined that I could handle the additional duties and we had about 6 weeks to train me before she departed. In theory, it was plenty of time. But then, consider that both of us worked four day workweeks. (She took a day off every week and I took a day off every week, but we never took the same day off as we covered each other’s jobs.) So, then we were down to 18 work days for me to learn her duties. Then, of course, I missed two additional days during that time for refrigerator service and she missed several additional days with a tooth problem and subsequent root canal. Her last day at the office was April 30, so since then, I’ve been on my own. I expect it will get easier as soon as I figure out what in the hell I am doing.

Homefront

Spring is always a busy season for us, what with five acres and an old fixer-upper house and summer being generally too hot to do major outdoor work projects. As soon as the winter weather breaks we get outside and get busy. We’ll be on that track until sometime in July when the heat beats us to a pulp. One big project is almost done – new columns for the front porch. This is one project that has been on our list for seven years, but, you can see by the pictures that we couldn’t put it off anymore. We were getting very afraid the porch roof was going to collapse! We couldn’t find replacement columns in the style we wanted, so Brian built them himself. As soon as he gets them painted, I’ll post the pictures.