It's Always Something

Lately it seems as if there's always something going wrong. I was reminded of this while sitting at home today waiting on the carpenters who were repairing the hole they created in our kitchen back in November. We got a call from the landlord saying they'd be here between 9-10am. Chris has mouse surgeries all week, so I was stuck staying home. I got three subsequent calls from the carpenter each giving me a different arrival time. They showed up around noon, discovered they had the wrong color wood, and left to go shopping. They finally finished around 3pm, which meant I wasn't able to go to work at all today. Sounds ok in theory, but I need to make those hours up and it feels like a complete waste of a day.

Since I'm bored, I thought I might bore you with photos of our on-going kitchen saga. It started in November when our washer stopped working. First the plumber came, he determined that the washer could not be pulled out due to the way the cabinets had been built around it. So then a few days later the carpenter came to remove a cabinet. Next the plumber came back and fixed the washer. Three months later, the carpenter came back to install a new smaller cabinet...actually a wine rack. I would imagine the worse possible place for a wine rack would be in the kitchen next to the oven. We certainly won't be storing wine in it.

A stuck washer in November...


A fixed washer, but missing cabinet in November.


A replacement "cabinet" installed in February!

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, we had computer problems when our anti-virus software expired. Luckily, re-formatting the hard drive has seemingly solved the problems we were having. However, we now have new problems. For example, the space bar on our keyboard came off and so I'm typing this on an external USB keyboard. It only cost 9 pounds, but it's taking up valuable USB space (only 3 of the 4 are working). We could get all our laptop problems fixed under warranty but that would involve transferring our warranty to the UK which seems silly considering we're moving home this summer. I just hope nothing else goes wrong in the meantime. It's only when a computer is not working that you realize just how often you need it.

I purchased flight tickets to move home last night, but that didn't go smoothly either. We bought them through studentuniverse.com which offers discounted airfare to students and faculty. We haven't purchased flights through them since moving here but had bought quite a few when living in the U.S. Anyway, I didn't realize until after buying our tickets that they had to call the HR departments where we work to determine if we were faculty members. Apparently, you cannot simply be a staff member, you actually have to be a professor. Luckily, we were able to get the tickets cancelled. We think Chris would have qualified, but I definitely did not. So now it's back to the web to search for cheap one-way tickets home in July.