Piling Up Like The Dishes - A Friday The 13th Special

 

21 years of service, still usable

#inkflowswarmday8  (6 and 7 will be  written later)

#healingthroughcreativeresources

The ink has gone from warm to lukewarm to cold and indifferent. But I'll try and heat it up. Which date does this post belong to?

11th and 12th October slipped out of my hands as I struggled with unexpected hardware issues that were not about the house but about objects within the house. On the 11th I was busy writing a challenging post that belonged to the 10th, on a complex theme around house, home and self. Soon thereafter my mind was working on a sequel that never quite formed itself into a post. Because the universe decided to throw a teaser my way. Trust the universe - always! ☺☺ Looking back I realize that my writing as well as my reading on the computer have been rather slow and I've been blaming the unusual flicker on my monitor screen for it. Our minds work in strange ways at such times and I was looking for the reason in all the wrong places. Including, as I have been conditioned to do, myself. Was it after all, my eye giving more trouble than usual and overreacting to a flicker? Drat the monitor - this is what comes of buying second hand goods. Please ask me why I buy them. The answers are not so pretty.

And so on :)

This monitor has been less than perfect - a few marks and lines at the edges - since the start. It's been more than serviceable, though. Well early yesterday morning - oops 8 am, much later than usual - I flicked the main power switch of my computer and the damned spike buster went POP!

Initially I glowered at my poor computer, thinking the SMPS might have decided the heat wave was too much. I sniffed the poor thing to make sure and then decided the direction of the sound pointed to the culprit, pictured below.

Thereon ensued a saga that I am not as yet convinced has wound up.

The culprit

I have a way of collecting old stuff - working, partly working, even defunct. And this stood me in good stead. I fished out an old spike buster that I had abandoned for reasons that seemed very pressing at the time I did. Plugged in all my stuff and all my stuff worked. A monitor with NO flicker. I almost forgot to notice, relieved as I was that my computer came to life.

Oops! I'd had every chance to be ahead of this one and saved the trouble, had I just tried my monitor with a different power source when I sensed the flicker but ... such are the ways of old fools. Heck, I have been feeling foolish all year over follies current and past, including those ancient, long forgotten ones that come back to bite like all karma does eventually, especially the less pleasant ones.

What happened next wasn't funny. The computer that came to life and seemed alive for a bit, started turning itself to standby mode. Several rounds of coming out of the mode only to be dumped backed in and then it dawned on me that my keyboard wasn't behaving itself. Wait - pressing a few keys was hanging the system up! In fact pressing keys to find a spike buster online at the Amazon Puja Sale ☺☺☺

First things first - an anguished and somewhat menacing call to my techie, Dharminder whom some of you are familiar with from honorable mentions on my shows. And then the real work at my end to diagnose the problem, me having fully qualified over the years as a half baked techie ☺

Guess what? I promptly whipped out my old keyboard that had served me for 21 years (yes my precious collector's item) and been pensioned off reluctantly over a non functioning "e" key. True enough, I connected it, started to type sans "e" and no problem turned up at all. Like ever.

Of course you know by now that I had brought the roof down on poor Dharminder's head. I told him in my nth call that I now had a suspect and it was the keyboard. The rest you know. He arrived late in the day, bearing goodies. I've had to shell out money and I do hope all this stuff lasts me for a while and doesn't trouble me. My dearly loved speakers have been producing some odd sounds and today they hung up my computer with the same power-saving nonsense after emitting choked growls. Fortunately they've come back to life. For good measure I've ordered some cheap backup speakers and a cheap mouse (the mouse feels strange to my touch today, and hey, wasn't it feeling strange all month?) To be sure I've lost my marbles but I bet you'd do the same. Now what's making me more unsettled and shaky is that today is Friday the 13th. I have no particular fear of #13, in fact I consider it my lucky number. Maybe one that tries and tests me but rewards me eventually. I use the number a lot and I'm comfortable around it. I have generally liked Fridays though they've had some associations with death in my life. One Friday the 13th though, always gives me the chills and that's Friday October 13th. The one in the year 2000. It was the day my brother went sadly from a hospital to a lonely guest house he didn't belong in, to live out the remaining days of his life. This is a story I don't want to repeat or dwell on much, but the events of the past few months, indeed of recent years, have brought back into focus the reasons why his last days were forced to turn out the way they did. That year's domestic challenges were resolved for me over the coming years, but never fully. As I stand at the brink of a scary project in the house - Project Waterline - there is recall. Especially today. And maybe I'm writing this for no reason except to unload those fears and emotions a little more fully. Knowing well that this post may make sense to nobody but myself.

But so it is ...

Footnote - Piling up like the dishes because water shortage is the theme that weaves its way through the years of my life, winding in an out. Don't get me wrong. At times there's been so much abundance that it became my enemy. I need for sure to heal my relationship with water