Friday 2 March 2012

What a week!


This week started poorly as on Monday and Tuesday not feeling all that great, just run down and under par. Then on Wednesday no laptop!!!! No internet connection, nothing on Ipad or Iphone either. So seemed reasonable to conclude that there was a problem with the router, as opposed to the laptop. Phoned I T man, who offered to call after his last call that day, 8-9, however after thinking about it, realised it would be a problem as OH works nights  and he would be getting ready, so phoned him back and arranged for Thursday afternoon. 

Then surprise surprise, on Wednesday night I heard iPhone ping and on checking all ok, so quickly online and explaining what had happened. Thursday morning, zilch, nada, nothing, glad I hadn’t called to cancel appointment!

On Thursday, I noticed again a strange noise in the bathroom, kind of like an electric hum, as it had been around a couple of weeks decided it was too annoying to leave so called the plumber and the young man arrived early afternoon. After listening in the bathroom he went off to investigate, in a wee while called me through to show me where he had moved the washing machine and dryer out of my wee utility area and rolled back the vinyl to expose sodden floor boards. He lifted some of them to find a huge fountain erupting from the joint at a copper and lead pipe…..and a lake under it.



He worked on and managed to fix the leak but we also noticed the kitchen sink waste unit had dropped and needed either lifted or replaced. As it is obviously better to get that done before the new floorboards are laid, we arranged for plumber to come back today. So the washing machine and dryer, plus washing hamper, cat food supplies and dishes all moved into kitchen, washing machine pulled back as far as we could to get out the way and so it could be connected and therefore useable. 



Unfortunately the joiner can’t come till Tuesday to lay new floorboards, so chaos will be with me all weekend.

By this time we realised no sign of IT man, he was running late but it was going to be too late for OH, so changed yet again to this afternoon. Plumber came this morning, did all he needed to do, IT man arrived and found the router just needed to be reprogrammed, so all ok there. We had a conversation as he mentioned he often had reconditioned laptops (thinking about mum) and then thought about my old knackered laptop, so he is off with it, convinced he will be able to fix it and then take it to  mum and set it all up for her, yeah!! Fingers crossed!!

In the middle of all this I got a phone call from mums alarm people to say her alarm had gone off and police were on their way! Phoned mum, all well, but when she went into the cupboard where the control, panel lives, a red light came on….. by which time the police car appeared all lights flashing – policeman jumped out the car and ran up to the door and pounded on it. However they were very good and once convinced that she was fine went off. When she phoned the alarm people to tell them (this has happened before) they asked her if she would be in all weekend then they would get an engineer out on Monday!!!!! Anyway, engineer has now been but couldn’t figure out what is wrong, but have changed the setting so that if the alarm goes off they will phone her first to check the situation before alerting the police! Her poor neighbour came running up the street to see if she was ok, and got all emotional hugging her. Any other neighbours around must have wandered what on earth was going on!

Mother was stressed with all this so when the local kids started cycling up and down the road, and the footballs came out she was pacing in her dining room watching them in case of damage. I do wish some of these neighbours who encourage their kids to play with footballs in the street would make sure their kids stayed at their own houses, but of course they don’t and then older residents like my mum get stressed to hell. Apart from the danger of damage to her garden or windows, there have a few narrow misses from cars with kids running out from behind parked cars.

Why is it that life just rolls along with the usual old ups and downs, then suddenly it all goes to hell?