Honestly, if ONE MORE electronic device in this house gives me trouble, I'm gonna go mad! (No cracks, please.) Last week when my laptop battery died, I had to leave it with a repairman overnight. It was the longest 24 hours ever. I felt like I'd lost a limb. If it weren't for my phone, I'd have been completely lost but it's back to working like its old self and it had better stay that way.
I've been so discombobulated lately that I felt I just had to get out of the house for something besides spending money at the local big box store on groceries. Those grandsons can sure eat us out of house and home. They're worth it, though. Anyway, we spent a couple of hours driving around in the countryside and the wildlife refuge trying to spot turning leaves. We just don't get enough color around here to satisfy my need to be in a forest in the fall. The only thing better would be a light snowfall on a winter evening while sitting bundled up in our recliners enjoying our remote-controlled fireplace.
Our fireplace decided to give us trouble this year. We babied it along last year but this year, no dice. David took it apart, trying to figure out what was wrong. He's usually very good with these kinds of things but this time he called in reinforcement from a local company that's supposed to know how to fix these things. The young fella came in, hung around for an hour or so, charged us an arm and a leg and still no working fireplace. We've ordered several parts, and I don't want to add up what it's cost us so far. All I can say is it better be working by the time the predicted cold front hits this weekend.
The next thing to give me fits was our television, or more specifically, the satellite dish. I spent I don't know how long chatting with customer service yesterday about the baby receiver in our bedroom that has been acting wonky for months. I'd finally gotten fed up. They reset the whole system which was such fun since that entailed unplugging all the related devices. It's a good thing David was here to do that. I'm not tall enough to reach any of them. And that's another thing that bugs me. They always ask me to check the connections to see if they're plugged in securely. Same thing with the receiver. The baby receivers are out of reach and the main receiver is under the television where no one can access it without pulling it out. No, I tell them, none of it can be loosened by accident.
This afternoon while watching an amusing program our granddaughter Trinity recorded, the sound suddenly disappeared. Was my television sound going out? I checked the programming on the antenna and nope, all good. I checked the sound on the bedroom television. The recorded program has sound. What the heck?
I reset the receiver, got the sound working and we finished watching our program. It's a show about people who fool other people online. I hadn't seen it in a few years, so I watched it with her. She finds it quite funny. The show ended, I went to select another show and boom the sound goes out again. I reset the receiver again. This is getting really old really fast.
I had to update all our electronic devices yesterday which is also fun since we have three phones, one iPad, a laptop and a watch. It seems like they send updates every other week. It's almost as bad as turning the clocks back and forth but more frequently. There's nothing like spending a whole afternoon getting them all updated. I'm afraid if I tried to do them all at once our Internet would have a hissy fit from drawing too much of whatever it is they run on and go on strike.
I had to set my foot down with the boys using the house phone and iPad for their games. They had so many games loaded I couldn't update them, so the new rule now is for every game loaded one must be deleted. They don't want me to do the deleting. I'd delete them all.
While watching television, my watch buzzed, I went to check it and it went blank! After a few seconds of panic, it came back. My iPad loves to freeze up on me when I play my favorite word puzzle. I sure wish one of those frequent updates would focus on that.
So, as we near Halloween here's hoping the 'gremlins' messing with my electronics find a new place to live.
Happy Halloween, y’all.