This week has been quite a trial, but, looking back on it, it seems that all the things that went wrong were about stuff that we own and rely on. And could probably do fine without, if we had to.

The Jeep has been acting flaky for some time. We had it worked on a few weeks ago, and they fixed something (new radiator) but not actually what we took it in for, which was that sometimes it just quits. Sometimes this happens when we’re stopped. Sometimes when we’re moving. Kind of scary when we’re moving. Well, on Monday it quit while we were miles from home, but started up again. And on Tuesday it quit and wouldn’t start again.

Turns out it was a loose wire, which took hours to find and seconds to fix.

The van has been out of service for some time – the brakes don’t work.

Also, for the last few weeks, my laptop has been flaky. Long pauses in the middle of doing fairly mundane things. It became evident on Monday that my hard drive was on the way out. Perhaps if I had caught that a while back, I could have isolated the bad blocks and fixed the problem, but I didn’t find it until it was pretty far advanced. On Tuesday, it got critical, and on Wednesday, I spent most of the day trying to get files copied off of it so that I could take it in for service.

Oh, wait. No cars.

Taxis are few and far between in Lexington, and there wasn’t anybody nearby and handy to give me a ride. But I called Mr. Taxi, and they promised someone would be there in 10-15 minutes. It took 50.

When I got to Elan Technologies – the only certified Apple repair place in Lexington – the guy behind the counter treated me almost with contempt, or, at least, as though I was an enormous inconvenience to him, rather than as though I was there to help him pay his mortgage. Few things bug me as much as dismissive customer service. I’d almost rather someone be rude than just ignore me. Anyways, he promised that maybe, if nothing more important came up, he’d try to have a look at it by Friday. But, you know, maybe not. We’re awful busy. With, you know, important stuff. Bye now.

So most of this week I’ve been working on Maria’s laptop, for which I don’t have a VGA adapter, so it’s been on a 13″ screen, while I’m mostly used to working on the 27″ screen.

But, all of this is surmountable. The Jeep is fixed, and I expect I’ll have my laptop back some time this month. Or, you know, maybe next month, if nothing more important comes up.