Sunday 27th January - the year of broken things

Assuming that we start from the beginning of the church year - Advent - the following breakages have occurred in this household, causing greater, or occasionally lesser, inconvenience.

DECEMBER
1 various headlights and sidelights on my car - fixed yesterday (thank you kindly, Best Beloved)

2 The brand new Christmas lights failed the day after we put the tree up. This one could have been a real pain, except that we were able to take just the transformer section back to the garden centre, check it on their lights, and bring back a replacement. It would have been Very Annoying if we had had to undress the tree to remove the lights.

3 the washing machine started flashing all kinds of warning lights on Christmas Eve. A bit of heavy lifting and mucky draining on Christmas Morning dealt with the blocked filter.

4 the cooker - failed spectacularly on Christmas Day. This is worth a mega blog post on its own - the fourth, and maybe final? engineering visit is scheduled for Tuesday. Meanwhile it has been the recipient of a new element and a new fan so far, and is due a replacement motherboard (!). Cue a serious of rotten puns about how this mother is bored of waiting for the motherboard, and a Flanders and Swann classic;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOA_SUKEZRE (courtesy of boggyb)

JANUARY
5 the electric wall switch for the cooker (that's how the engineer discovered that a new element didn't fix the problem)

6 the bathroom light bulb; on investigation it was the ancient light fitting that had also failed. No matter. Bathing by candlelight is quite fun. Brushing one's teeth by torchlight is quite manageable. For a day. Or two. Or until the weekend.

7 The top drawer of the freezer fell out. It missed my foot, so that didn't get broken, but the drawer is missing a few bits of plastic

8 the warning light, saying various lights on my car are not working, is still glowing, redly, untruthfully, malevolently, in spite of All the bulbs being replaced and checked.

9 Our telephone handset; suddenly started feeling too hot to touch when removed from the base station unit. The new telephones are ok. I'll get used to the rather aggressive ring sound in time. There was a choice of 32 noises. The worst might have been the electronic rendition of Mozart's Turkish Rondo. Rendered is a good choice of word for the noise.

10 My sweet, darling, gorgeous, wonderful, idiosyncratic mp3 player. I use it every day when teaching, and at night, when I can't sleep, Joan Hickson reading "Miss Marple" stories sends me off in minutes. (DON'T rely on Peter Sallis reading Hercule Poirot to make you sleepy; his reading is too entertaining as somehow the accents of Grommit and M Poirot are hopelessly entangled). I had thought I was going to have to buy a new mp3 player today, but Best Beloved managed to force it to reset, and rebuilt it with all my music intact.

11 The nifty little LED clip-on spot we bought from IKEA has taken to twinkling in a most unsatisfactory way. Maybe flickering or wavering would be better descriptions. We have unplugged it pending further investigation.

12 Going to bed last night, BB opened a drawer in the chest of drawers. However the whole drawer front came off in his hands, leaving the rest of the drawer still in the chest, so to speak. No matter. In due course some wood glue and a little application of time and patience should sort that.

That's a round dozen. Admittedly 1, 4, 6, 9 and 10 are on the "done" list, leaving just 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, and 12 on the "outstanding" list.

We are NOT amused.

Addendum. Also broken is my ability to work out what has been mended and what has been fixed. BB has just pointed this out to me. I could now delete or correct the relevant paragraph, but I know The Man Across The Pond is going to enjoy spotting all my errors, so I'll leave them in for him.