Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

There are moments when we stop in the midst of the hurly-burly of our lives and reflect on the current condition of our humanity.  On this particular occasion, I am sickened by the number of things I own, things over whose purchase I agonized, and then paid dearly for, things that now just don’t fucking work:

• Windows installed when we remodeled in 1981.  I wanted wood instead of aluminum, I wanted double-hung instead of single-hung so I could open the upper sash and allow circulation near the ceiling, where hot air accumulates.  Then, on one of the handful of days in Seattle when we need all the air circulation we can get, I go to open a window in the kitchen and my wife yells, “Don’t open those windows.  If you do, we’ll never be able to close them.”  In another room, a balky sash, when popped out, disclosed a broken spring mechanism that may not be replaceable.
  
• My Archos mp3 player.  Apparently dead for good after numerous attacks with a well-intentioned soldering iron have been repelled.  I was able to save all the music onto my desktop’s hard drive, but it was sad to go through my work week out of town, and the attendant plane trips, without my tunes.  I’m reluctantly shopping now, considering either the HP iRiver or the Creative Nomad Zen Xtra.  Any suggestions would be welcomed.
  
• My Dell laptop.  Now 6 months beyond warranty, I still have the maddening “wandering cursor” syndrome, which I had them fix twice while it was under warranty, as well as a dead built-in modem that I replaced with a modular card, and now a sound card that produces a maddening, rhythmic stutter that makes music playback and movie-watching unbearable.
  
• My Kyocera cell phone.  The display only works when I squeeze the phone a certain way and press one of the buttons, so now when it rings, I can’t tell who’s calling without answering the damn thing, which I often regret, and I can’t easily look up a number and dial it without furiously squeezing the phone like a teenage…never mind.
  
• Only one of the six ceiling lights in my office works.
  
• The garage door is off its hinges and won’t open without a wrestling match
  
• The house needs a coat of stain
  
• The deck needs a coat of stain
  
• The retaining wall in front is bulging further and further towards the street, and will surely maim some child or old person when it collapses sometime in the next year or two.

The accumulated weight of curing these various ills daunts and paralyzes.  I’ll get to it eventually.  But, as long as my kayak still floats, it most likely won’t be this weekend.