Technology hasn’t had an easy way to go this week in the Haddix household. Okay, let’s be honest—it hasn’t been the entire household. Hubby and the kitten haven’t been the instigators of doom. I have.

You all know about the mouse in the heat pump who took the (final) ride of his life courtesy of the blower motor. Well, I think it was Thursday evening that my external battery charger that I use on a daily basis for my laptop bit the dust. After fifteen months of service, it gave a silent heave of death and refused to accept another charge. It’s like a collect call gone horribly wrong. I’m calling, but it’s refusing charges. It no longer wants to communicate with me. Drat.

Sunday morning, we were expecting guests for game day. I was busy at the stove mixing up the stuff for the Tacosagna. I kept turning down the burner, but it kept getting hotter and hotter. Somewhat startled by this response, I lifted the skillet up off the eye (electric stove) to see that it was glowing white-hot in the middle. Cursing did ensue, then a weak-kneed thankfulness that it responded to the now-smoking control knob and allowed itself to be turned off.

This was the last straw for me with this stove. It’s just over two years old, and it’s had a series of quirky little “issues.” The oven light kept burning out after two or three uses of any new bulb. I baked potatoes and carrots for over three hours at 400 degrees and they were still raw. The lesson here, I suspect, was to not buy the cheapest thing on the market. And not to order it from the local big box store, as I swear to you, I think they took it off the truck and dropped it at every stop they had that day.

So given that it tried to incinerate me to the point that it took a full fifteen minutes for the burner to cool down enough that I could hover my hand in the vicinity of that burner, I was ready to take it out and shoot it. No, seriously. I’d use it for target practice if I had a truck to haul it on and a place to take it that was safe for outdoor shooting. I think I’d quite enjoy that destruction.

The almost-disaster was averted, though it was a bit irksome. We’d decided to get a new heat pump before winter hits and the twenty-year-old system dies, and we’d planned to have a gas line installed in preparation for getting a gas stove at some point in the future. Key words there – in the future. Ah, who knew the future was going to be so close at hand? It’s all good, I suppose. Get it over and done with now. I ordered it today, and with luck, it will be here the afternoon of the install of the heat pump.

But it didn’t stop there, my disregard for technology. The final blow, and perhaps the one that hit me the hardest, was the “death” of our outdoor trail cam. It’s our redneck version of a security camera. We already owned it so it was “free” and hey, it works. Or it did work. We’ve caught all sorts of interesting things on this camera since we put it in – there was the orb that I still can’t explain. There was the fact that our neighbors down the road took the furniture we put out for the trash. There were the two runaway dogs who escaped from their confines to roam freely and probably become floozies with the mutt down the street.

And then last night, it didn’t work. Nothing was recorded. When I went to get the card out of the camera, it was dead. D. E. A. D. Dead.

By this point, I’m muttering under my breath, whispering imprecations, and giving Mercury the stink-eye. I was certain it had to be in retrograde, but apparently not—at least according to IsMercuryinRetrograde.com. Yep, that’s a real website. I didn’t know that until today. Cool, huh? Anyhoo…

After coming inside and confirming that the card was empty, that in fact no recording took place overnight, I stomped back out to the camera, reinserted the card, cursed it a few times for good measure, and hit all the buttons to see if one was causing the problem. Finally, thankfully, it showed that it was capturing images. We’ll see if that proves to be the magic cure or not in the morning when I go out to retrieve the card. I may literally weep if it isn’t fixed.

In any event, it has been a challenging week for technology here and thus for me. It’s certainly to the point that if hubby asked me to touch his computer (no, that isn’t an innuendo, ha!), I’d refuse and back away slowly. I can hope that whatever this influx of the “technology flu” is, it’s passing and has in fact gone. I shudder to think what might be next on the hit list if it hasn’t.

Happy Reading!

T. L.