Caveat five: never assume.

            You finally call the appliance repair guy because now your stove, your fridge AND your dishwasher are all crashing.  He’s a nice repair guy and comes out the very next day.  You have, of course, put off calling which is why the sink and counters are full of dirty dishes and the fridge shelves are covered with ice.

 No dishwasher. Chaz with mono.  Not a good thing.

First he looks at the oven.  You explain: when you do the self-clean, the oven locks itself, then starts to heat up.  Before, it would heat to maybe 650-700.  Once everything inside was nuked, it’d shut itself off.  But last two tries (the second try because we forgot the try before), it locked itself and proceeded to heat up WAY past 650, WAY past the everything’s ash-point with no shut off in sight.  You outline your subsequent scramble to trick the thing into disengage and unlocking which, you recall, might have involved throwing the breaker.

He solves the problem: do not use the self clean.  Self clean should never have been invented.  It wrecks the paint on the inside and melts the clock from behind.  So don’t use it.

For this fix: no charge.

He diagnoses the dishwasher: clogged up spinner arms and a clogged filter.  Turns out you CAN’T stick an entire cake in one of these dishwashers and find no trace of it after a wash cycle.  Arms are no longer spinning because the water-power is thwarted by old broccoli fibers and other assorted bits of cellulose.  For this, he orders parts and will be back next week.  Charge?  About $180 in the end.  In the meantime, dishes are done by hand.  (By hand?  Really?)  Your husband comes up with a brilliant plan: he uses the dishwasher as a drying rack.

The fridge:  I am switching person now, because there is a personal note to be made: it was my insurance agent, who is, in fact, my friend on Facebook and who has watched over my family for decades (Kim Schroeppel – best agent EVER – Multiserve http://yellowpages.heraldextra.com/multi+serve+insurance+agency.9.10300193p.home.html) who figured out what was wrong with the dang machine – or her husband did:

If you find water inside your fridge and if everything from lettuce and strawberries to milk and left over Mexican food suddenly freezes in there, here is your problem: your drain is clogged.  She told me, you take out the crisper drawers and find the drain and you clean it out and – Ta-DA!! Problem solved.

Except, when I pulled out the drawers, there was  no drain.  Just a fairly yucky pond of water.

Aha, says the repairman.

Kim was right.

Repairman Ben poks around the entire fridge/freezer, looking for the drain.  He opens the control box in the back of the fridge and a miniature Niagra comes gushing out of the electrical wiring box.  This does not seem like a good thing.  We unload the entire freezer (how long has THAT been in here, and what, exactly is it?) so he can take out the removable panel (there’s a removable panel?) at the very back (how convenient!). This is a mite problematic considering the fact that all the counters are already overflowing with mono-coated dirty dishes. In the end we find that, since the fridge is a piece of very modern and advanced technology, its unsightly drain has been put on the OUTSIDE of the appliance, at THE BACK of the dang thing.  Which means that, if you have to get to it, you either install some attractive cabinet door on the wall of the living room, or you have to pull the entire fridge out of the surrounding built in cabinets, across the funky soft pinewood floor.

I was afraid of what I was going to see once we pulled the thing out.  I’d done a little drain hunting myself before Ben showed up (Pioneer Appliance – right on time to the second): me on my stomach with a flashlight, prying off the nasty black grate at the bottom of the front of the fridge – me starting away in alarm and disgust at the furry things seemingly growing on the coils underneath the thing.

Took me a good half an hour to clean the floor we finally exposed.  Who could have known we were such disgusting slobs?  But Ben had found the drain, removed it, schlepped it outside.  He blew the thing out with the garden hose – and a small black mass shot out into the grass.  “There’s your problem,” he said. 

Ewww.

The charge for all this?  “Just the coming-out-to-see charge,” he said.  About $80.  To be paid when all the parts had come in and the dishwasher was alive again.

It took me the better part of half an hour to get all the food back into the fridge and freezer.  “You’re sure it’s plugged in?” I asked G before we shoved it back into its place.  But I knew it was; I’d looked myself.  Chapter closed.

The next day brought us the Great Colt Canyon Ride, a completely spontaneous burning off of an entire Saturday.  As I put the horses away, Chaz called.  When I expressed my apologies about having left home, hearth and family for the whole dang day, she had a great brainstorm: make it up to dad by stopping at the store on the way home (me in my horse-jeans that by now are standing up in the saddle all by themselves) and picking up some chocolate ice cream.  G had had a craving for some, it seems, and the stuff we already had, almost a full tub, had somehow turned into chocolate milk.

In fact, everything in the freezer had pretty much turned into chocolate milk.

Because nobody had actually turned the freezer and fridge BACK ON.  There’s a SWITCH for that?  Why didn’t somebody tell me we’d actually turned them OFF? All I could think of was my hidden tub of Lime Sherbet (hint: the perfect summer lunch after a morning in the hot arena?  Lime Sherbet floating in peach Fresca).

So when the guy comes to your house?  No matter how nice he is – CHECK UP on him.  Or spend the next several weeks trying to figure out if what you just ate is tasting just a little funny.

It was Tuesday before Ben came back with the parts.  The dishwasher is now happily chugging away in the kitchen, and the mono dishes are sterilized.  The cost for the entire thing?  $140.  Evidently, turning the fridge back on is supposed to be part of the service.

So, life could be worse.

Caveat Four: listen to the warning

            When you buy a brand new old car and the guy who sold it to you (who is now something like your friend on Facebook, except in real life) hands you only one key—and when you ask, “We only get one key?” tells you yes, that that one key is all that came with the dang thing when he got it at auction—and not only that, but that these are the NEW kind of keys that will prevent people from stealing your car by costing so much to duplicate that thieves cannot afford to duplicate them and thus cannot drive the car away.

            One key is not a good thing.  So you finally remember to take the one key to the dealer, intending to ask them to make you a duplicate—only to find out that the process evidently takes several hours at their labor rates and cannot be done, in any case, until tomorrow.  And will cost, by the way, about two hundred dollars.

            The keys have chips in them.  Computer chips, not little missing chunks.  They “talk” to the car.  People say that money talks, so that makes sense.

            So you go home and do some internet searching, and then resort to the actual Yellow Pages which are still being printed, even in these advanced technical times.  You find a locksmith that will duplicate the key for only $55, which you are forced to admit sounds like a bargain (see phrase about these advanced technical times).  So you drive out to the next town over, find the locksmith and spend a good hour with him. He warns you that your One Key is actually a “valet” key, which does not, by the way,  mean that when you use it the car will park itself.  The locksmith, knowing this and knowing that it could cause problems, still decides to go ahead and try to make you a new key.  He chooses just the right blank key (with just the right Texas Instruments chip in it) and cuts the duplicate teeth into it.  Then he takes out a manual that will instruct him as to how he must politely ask the car, which evidently has a computer in it born and bred only for the purpose of talking to this key, to use that computer to program the new key.

            The conversation with the car goes as follows:  the technician sticks the One Key into the ignition (without starting the car) then tromps once briefly on both break and gas simultaneously (and vigorously)—at which point the security light, which has been blinking since the car door opened,  stops blinking.  Then he inserts the new blank key, tromps on the gas one-two-three-four times, and then on the break one-two-three-four-five-six-seven times. 

            Thus we see that even tromping can count as language, which we actually knew before, having lived with men.

            After that, the security light begins blinking again, and is supposed to keep it up for eighty seconds while the car’s computer to re-programs the chip.   Maybe less than eighty seconds.  Never more.  If the job is done.  And so you stare at the little red light, willing it to stop.  Which it will do, right? 

            Or not.

            There is a second protocol in the manual, this one containing an alternate pattern of tromping and pedal pushing, rounded out with the brisk opening and slamming of the driver’s side door several times.  I am not making this up.

            It seems that a valet key cannot instruct the computer to reprogram anything.  It takes a Master Key to do that.  A Master Key which the former owner evidently coveted as a keepsake.  And which can only be replaced by—you got it—the dealer.

            So you go back to the dealer, resigned to the astronomical cost of additional keys.  And you are very bright, figuring that you will drive out to the dealer in your OTHER car so that he can program the key while you drive over to Walmart to pick up groceries.  Except that he needs the car, as we will recall from the above story, to do the programming.  So you have to drive home and get someone, who is supposed to be at work, to follow you back out to the dealer and then bring you home.  So that you can be there when, fifteen minutes later, the dealer (the service guy, who is really a prince of a person) calls to tell you that, being that you have no master key and are trying to make one, he has to erase everything on the car computer and reprogram IT first and hey – WOO-HOO – you just happen to have bought one of the TWO YEARS’ models that were made with computers that CANNOT BE ERASED AND RE-PROGRAMMED.

            Not to worry.  These computers can be replaced.  At a cost of: $1500 American (NOT, thankfully 1500 pounds, which would be much, much worse).

            Here is the good part: Toyota actually has OWNED their mistake and will replace the computer on their own dime as long as YOU pay for the keys and that re-programming.  So they will, roughly, go halvesies with you.  Oh – and it will take five days to get the new computer.  So you want to be very careful not to lose your one single key during that period.

            At last, you have the keys made—two hundred and fifty dollars for two keys.  You wanted three more keys, but you feel badly about the locksmith who already cut that other key and will have to eat it if you do not go back.  So you only get two from the dealing, marveling at the fairness of the dealer in NOT charging you twice for the labor on the second key.

            Several days later, you go back to the locksmith who spends one solid hour, while you are inside his shop where it is air-conditioned playing with his gorgeous but sharp fanged tiny English bull dog puppy, trying to re-program that key.  “I don’t get it,” he finally says. “I’ve done this before.  I own a flipping SEQOIA, for heck’s sake.”  But after all that, he fails.  And you are left realizing that you now will have to save up another two hundred dollars for ONE key that you could have bought at the same time you bought  the others—which would have cost only another $50. 

Mark Twain once said, “I have done eleven good deeds in my life and lived to regret every one of them.”

Okay.  So I have not answered comments as I have wished to.  I have not even answered email.  I have spent the last month doing – I don’t know what – at about seventy miles per hour, which may be why all this dumb stuff has been happening. Good things: 39 rides on the colt.  We just moved Chaz into her new college apartment.  Bad things: colt tore a hole in his leg.  We just moved Chaz into her new college apartment.

So what I am writing here is a series of small warnings, based on recent experience.  Perhaps I can save you some small suffering.  Not suffering, maybe, but waste and aggravation.  I should add to this: unplug EVERYTHING in your house when you are not using it for fear of having it blow up when the energy people send spikes your way.  Or better yet.  Go off the grid.  Heat your water in the sun and get a goat.  I’m sure it’s a very healthful way to live.

::For Your Edification::

Caveat One: clean out your nozzle

Yesterday, I shot myself in the eye with conditioner.  In the shower.  All of the conditioner bottles are lined neatly up on the window sill, and when I pushed the pump for the Aussie Secret Moisturizing, it shot me in the eye.  If I’d been aiming at my eye, I’d never in a million tries have hit myself. 

Caveat Two: never trust tape

When you take an institutional sized Sam’s club bottle of finely ground black pepper out of the cupboard (assuming that you have not used to fill actual pepper shakers yet) in order to put a little pepper on a chicken breast you are about to cook in a George Forman Family Sized Grill, do not assume that the Scotch tape someone has used to seal the spooning-out half of the top of the bottle (which, once opened, never closed right again) will hold.

And if you do make this assumption, do not allow the mounds of finely ground black pepper to remain on the grill once they are there.  Even though you are tired and hungry, do not leave them.  And if you do leave them, do NOT plug in the grill.

It seems that grilled finely ground black pepper pretty much fills up the air of every room in the house AND your lungs when it is heated.  And it smells, really, really terrible as it chars.  Especially over time and repeated grilling.  Maybe a corollary to the caveat: clean your grill at least once a year.  With a soft cloth.

Caveat Three: nothing lasts forever

When the “check tire pressure” light goes on in your car, try to remember—once you have brought the vehicle to a full stop—to get out and actually look at the tires.  Especially if several weeks go by and the light does not turn itself out.

Checking the tires yourself is preferable to, say, having your husband find the great big shredded hole in the back left tire.  Or to having the tire blow up when you are driving through the blazing hot and desolate southern Utah desert, which actually happened to me once.  But that was, like, decades ago.  At least.

to be continued . . .