Day 21 November challenge:

The troubles began on Wednesday, although all month long it seems one thing or another has either plagued us with extra expenses for the month or threatened my ability to follow through my personal commitment to post daily during November–just to see if I can do it–I have no intention whatever of trying to continue to post daily. My hat’s off to you who are doing it apparently so effortlessly. Here, as the late Paul Harvey, liked to say, is the rest of the story.

To recap: All of yesterday, the computer was giving me trouble crawling at a snail’s pace and interfering with the work I was trying to do. Thursday Hubby had installed a software called Skype that lets you see other people with Skype accounts when you connect with them online. Nice to visit the daughter and Ben in New York, we thought, but there were problems. The audio didn’t work and the security program that comes through our Cable provider was going  crazy with red x’s saying the computer wasn’t protected it was an emergency that needed attention right away! I was more than willing to cooperate. To update, scan or whatever they wanted before the whole thing exploded in my face, but the thing kept running and running at a snail’s pace, and I couldn’t use it for anything else. I blamed it all on Hubby for loading my old computer with a program it couldn’t handle.

Bad enough that the gold crown in my mouth had come off in some hard taffy the day before and I had to schedule the dental appointment Thursday to have it put back in. There were other complications. Hubby had an important meeting clear across town that same day. Since I was using the main car, he would drive his little Miata convertible with a leaky front tire. Now the little Miata rarely gets driven, the last time remember it going out was when SIL and daughter #1 took it on a long drive to the mountains to check the last of the fall color about two weeks ago.

It was a little chilly to put the top down, but they rolled the windows up, turned the heater on full blast and drove on their merry way just like I used to in the Tennessee winters. After that it just sat in the garage looking pretty.

Long story short: He had a flat on the interstate. Then after the meeting he found the spare had gone flat too. Daughter drove to the rescue and he and the Miata finally made it home safely near dinnertime. Yesterday entailed another unscheduled shopping trip, to the station to buy and mount a new tire and have the spare fixed. $85. And the old tire was shredded into pieces. It’s a wonder it didn’t blow out and cause an accident!

Does anyone remember the $105 speeding ticket earlier this month? Well add to that $98 for remounting the crown, and the $85 new tire, and yup, you get $288! Unexpected expenses for just November. What can we expect in December?

But the story isn’t over yet! The computer was still acting up. Time for a new comptuer Hubby announced. Not without one last try I said! So most of the morning yesterday was spent keeping the grandson company because school was closed. Otherwise I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get things sorted out,defragging, moving pictures from the hard drive to a super gig flash drive, etc., getting a neck and shoulder ache in the process.

Grandson in the meantime was happy to allowed to watch all the television he wanted since he doesn’t have tv at home. He went through all the documentaries we had stored on DVR like the discovery of the Titanic–he’s really into disasters and pirates and sunken treasures and the like–and even watched the weather disaster channels. When that was all done he wanted to watch his favorite cartoons from On Demand. Son of a gun, not a one of them were working. We kept getting error messages.

He was devastated. Imagine being at Grandma & Grandpa’s house and not being able to watch  Scooby Doo or Teenage Ninja Turtle cartoons!? I kept getting error messages everytime I tried to program anything. Soon we discovered we’d lost every HDTV channel we had, and there were only a very few lower number channels left that were working. That’s when I called the Cable company. A technician tried to fix things from the office but her sources showed everything was fine. When we couldn’t figure it out, she scheduled an in-house tech to come “sometime between 1 and 5.”

We all waited. Grandson was duly picked up by parents and the four of them and the dog left on a weekend trip to the mountains. Hubby and I just kept waiting, because it seemed important to get it fixed yesterday so that he could spend his weekend watching golf and football as usual. I, in turn, was hoping the computer problems would be solved eventually when the scan was finished and the worm or whatever was wrong was flushed out.

When the tech finally got here, we still weren’t able to figure out the problem, so he and Hubby went downstairs where the connections came in from outside, and he found the problem. It was the plug! It was was barely hanging in the socket. He popped it in, and voila! Everything worked again. Not just the television, and the DVR,  but the computer as well since our tv, telephone, and internet service all come through the cable. It was that simple!

You may remember that Hubby insisted the Skype he installed wasn’t the problem? Well, he was right, although I’d made him uninstall it already. So as my punishment, he insisted I tell everyone that I made a mistake and apologize to him on my blog. So okay, here goes. You were right. I was wrong. I’m sorry.

And that ladies and gentlemen, for the little it’s worth, is the rest of the story!