January 6, 2017
Dear Everyone:
Christmas turned out to be much quieter than we had planned.
“Marshall” got sick and stayed home in
Fresno.
This made better sense than driving for four hours, while
suffering both a cold-or-the-flu and that
stomach bug that’s been making
the rounds, then spending all of Christmas Day in the bathroom.
“Jeannie” promptly “postponed” Christmas until further notice.
When we were growing up, and there was something our Mother wanted us to
do, her threat was always, “If you kids don’t (fill-in-blank), I’m going
to postpone Christmas!” Of
course, she only made this threat in December.
Making it in July wouldn’t really have the desired outcome.
Actually, even in December it never worked all that well.
We knew the threat was an empty one.
Nevertheless, when Alan Rickman portrayed the immortal
Sheriff of
Nottingham in
Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves (also known as “Dances With Peasants”), I
rented the video so Mother could watch it.
At one point, the harried Sheriff declared:
“No more merciful beheadings!
Cancel the table scraps for widows and orphans!
And call off Christmas!!!”
“See!” I told Mother.
“You’re not the only one!”
So when “Jeannie” effectively cancelled Christmas, it was a time-honored
tradition. Of sorts.
Eventually “Marshall” will find a reason to visit us here in the
Bay Area; but by then my gifts to them will be completely outdated (I
already warned “Jeannie” that there was a kind of food involved,
specifically chocolate
Santa Clauses.)
So I’ll tuck them away in a safe place and bring them out again
next year. “Jeannie” already
took care of the chocolates.
And the last two gifts that got lost in the Great Christmas Shipping
Snafu of 2016 finally found their way to the right address yesterday,
just in “time” since today is technically
Twelfth Night, the last day of
the Christmas Season.
In other news…
About a month or so ago, my
dryer, which I’ve had for five years, began
to make an ominous high-pitched rubbing sound.
Not exactly a whine, but worrisome all the same.
I decided to cross my fingers and hope that it would hold out
until after the Holidays.
The kind of dryer that I have is a standard size front-loading one.
But it is located inside the laundry closet, on top of the paired
washing machine. I looked in
my “fix-it-yourself” book, which I use mostly for diagnosing problems.
I figured the problem was probably with a belt of some kind.
After five years, you could expect the machine to need a new
belt. The book started with,
“…remove the back...”
It didn’t say anything about how to get the washer and dryer out of the
closet to even reach the back.
Obviously, I wasn’t about to try that on my own.
Time to get a repair person.
I have a home service contract that I expected to call and have them
assign a local service company to come and fix the problem for a “small”
co-payment. But when I tried
to schedule the service, I discovered that somewhere along the way, the
insurance company decided that general appliances were an “additional
feature” to the standard contract that I had.
So I have been paying over $500 per year for a service I no longer get.
Snot!
Here’s a little-known trick that you can use with
Google:
Enter a search for something like “dryer service”, then add a
colon (:) followed by your
Zip Code (no spaces).
The search results will be filtered to your specific area.
That’s how I found a company that does service calls on appliances like
washers, dryers and refrigerators (all now “extra” on the home service
contract) specifically here in
San Ramon.
Actually, it turns out that the company is located in
Union City,
but they were perfectly happy to come out to my place yesterday.
The service person was punctual, courteous and prepared, since I had
included the make and model of the dryer when I requested an appointment
on their website. He quickly
diagnosed the problem and had the necessary parts in his truck.
He also figured out a way to take the machine apart without having to
drag everything out of the closet and into the hallway.
It turned out that the problem was not with the belt, but with
the pulley that the belt runs on.
The pulley had “locked” in place, probably from five years of
running whenever I wanted it to do so, and that was what was causing the
rubbing sound.
Within two hours the dryer was humming along as quietly as when it was
new. And the repair person
even gave me the
Senior Discount.
Happy New Year!
Love, as always,
Pete
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