So You Wanted to Know What I’ve Been Up To During My Short Virtual Absence…

Is it Friday already?  Where in the world has the week gone?  I haven’t been home a single day this week – what with spending the day at the laundromat on Monday, then a full day dentist and doctor appointments on Tuesday followed by bi-monthly grocery shopping on Wednesday, then the realization that Princess Nagger is home all day today and it’s hubby’s birthday and he’s only working a 1/2 day today so we can all go see “How to Train your Dragon” in 3D at Princess Nagger’s request specifically for Dada’s birthday, so I had to go out yet again yesterday to secure all the Easter items for Princess Nagger’s Easter Basket and egg hunt then put it together and find a good hiding place for it until Sunday morning.

Whew! In spite of the incredibly long run-on sentence, had I said that to you in person it would have come out the exact same way and in one breath.  So here’s me taking a breath.

I still haven’t had a chance to make the rounds and try to make a dent in all the catching up I have yet to do, but rest assured it’ll happen.  Sometime soon.  When you least expect it.  Promise.

Meanwhile, I did promise an update on all the shenanigans when my computer blew up and created a crater in my online activity sending me into major withdrawals and the need to stifle my urge to toss said computer out the window and stomp on it.  My laptop hard drive went bad.

Luckily all the ‘important’ stuff was saved to auxiliary drives so I didn’t lose too much by way of importance, but man what a pain in the ass to replace the hard drive (but at least that was much easier than replacing the memory with bigger memory – one of the memory chips is under the keyboard.  Not so easy to replace).  Then reformat and reload the boatload of software I have (and find all the necessary disks which took some creative digging through random ‘stuff’ to find).

I had planned to hijack Princess Nagger’s dinosaur desktop while I was fixing mine since she and I share space on the same 8-foot table in the Summer House (and my chair has wheels…what, you don’t go “Wheeee!” when you wheel your chair around?  Huh.)  But I ran into a snafu with that computer, too – lots of spyware and a virus.  Fun.  So I decided to reformat and reload her computer too.

Luckily her computer doesn’t have much software on it, but I had to reinstall her kid games and make sure I put her desktop back to how she had it with the icons of the places she visits like Nickelodeon, Disney, etc., and the shortcut icons to her installed games, or I would have hell to pay since she remembers (like a hawk) every icon on her desktop.

Then of course there’s the issue with the washing machine.  Still.  There’s a whole big controversy going on about the front loading washers – because all of them at some point have the same problem ours has even though it’s not technically very old.  We bought our Kenmore front-loader in 2002.  In fact, it was delivered to our townhouse with the dryer on April 10, 2002.

When we moved into our house on July 5, 2003, we were still under warranty and had the Sears guys check the hookups and whatnot when they came out to deliver the new refrigerator we bought on June 30th to be delivered on July 3rd.   Which has a problem of its own with the ice maker not making ice.  And of course it’s out of warranty as well.  But we’re not going to address that issue.  Yet.

The problem with the washer is much more urgent – and way more frustrating.  Apparently when Frigidaire designed these front-loaders, the drum is made out of stainless steel.  Cool, right?  But the ‘spider’ part, that is welded to the drum and attached to the motor with the belt and bearings to make the drum spin around, is made out of aluminum.   Normally the pairing of stainless steel and aluminum is no big deal – unless it’s in a ‘wet’ environment.   Then you have an electrolyte which leads to corrosion.

After years of use, the contact of the aluminum with the stainless steel in a ‘wet’ environment causes eroding problems to the aluminum, so the ‘spider’ breaks, which will then cause another whole set of issues if not fixed promptly (like burning out the motor or causing the bearings to go bad, or the drum itself getting beat up by the imbalanced spin cycle).  So the smart thing to do is replace the spider part right away.

Only you can’t.  Because it’s welded to the drum.

The drum is covered under a 25 year warranty.  The spider part is not.  But you can’t replace just the spider part, you have to replace the whole drum because the spider part is attached to the drum and not replaceable all on its own.

And it’s not covered.

So basically that 25 year warranty on the drum is null and void because it’s not the drum that’s the problem, it’s the crap piece of aluminum attached to it.

So wrong on so many levels.

Replacing the drum costs only about a hundred dollars less than buying a brand new washing machine.  And you have to take the whole machine apart – including taking the motor out – in order to replace the drum.

So unless you can manage it on your own, you’re also looking at labor costs to replace the over-priced replacement of the drum.

Which is not covered under that 25 year warranty.

A simple coat of paint on the back of the drum would eliminate the issue of the stainless steel vs. aluminum electrolyte corrosion.  I told hubby that if we go the route of buying the drum and just replacing that vs. buying a whole new washer, why don’t we just add a coat of paint ourselves so we don’t have that issue?  But that means dismantling the drum to add the paint, which then negates the warranty.

I’m getting dizzy.

So the laundromat will be my latest hang-out while we fight with Sears about their bogus warranty and decide what to sell on eBay to pay for a new washer.  I have to say, though, that the laundromat near here is not too shabby of a place – it’s fairly new, so it has excellent machines and is a very clean place.  And it forces me off my computer and hands me some quiet time that allows me to actually read a book.  Not to mention I can get 6 loads of laundry done in 1/6th the time it would take at home.

I was all geared up to do laundry last Thursday – hubby and Princess Nagger went over there the night before to scope out the place and see how much things cost since it had been about 10 years since either one of us had set foot inside a laundromat.  He was jazzed that the machines accept credit cards – so he gave me his PayPal card to use.  Might as well make 1% back on the laundry, right?  Only he apparently didn’t notice this when walking into the place the night before:

A duct tape ‘X’ on the credit card insignias?  Generally a sign that they don’t take credit cards, no?  The duct tape looked like it had been there for a while, so I thought I might as well try the credit card just in case.  Because hubby did thoroughly scope it out the night before.  The machines may still have the credit card sliders on them, but they don’t work.  So I had to pull the dirty laundry back out of the machines and cram them back into the basket and lug them back out to the car.   On the way out I noticed this:

How in the world did the hubby miss that?  At least it gave me something to tease him with.  But more laundry piled up as I had to wait until Monday when hubby finally remembered to pull some cash out for me to utilize.  Maybe I shouldn’t have teased him so mercilessly.

I did get a chuckle out of this sign, though:

Hopefully I wasn’t breaking too many rules by loitering while I waited for my laundry to be finished.

In addition to the technological and appliance break-downs, our cordless phones also decided to bite the dust, too.   So we had to replace those last week as well.

The appliance I want to break so I can replace it is stubbornly hanging in there – my dishwasher.  It came with the house and even though it says “Whisper Quiet” on the front, it’s one of the noisiest dishwashers I’ve ever heard.  Not to mention it doesn’t clean the dishes very well, so I pretty much have to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher – which sort of negates the reason for having a dishwasher in the first place.

So to sum up my last week-and-a-half for those of you who skipped here to the end since it’s become a very long-winded post (which means I’m back to ‘normal’.  Ahem.)

• Computer crash which spiraled into a major repair on my computer as well as Princess Nagger’s computer causing major withdrawals from being forced offline for an extended period of time.

• Laundromat visits (with some woman giving me a crazy stare as I unloaded my laundry from the dryers to fold).  Note to self: start each load staggered so they don’t all end at the exact same time causing wrinkling issues when trying to do marathon folding before leaving).

• Washing machine education and searches for solutions and trying to talk to some form of management at Sears on some kind of resolution for their bogus warranty and replacement.

• Telephone dying and the realization that I rely too heavily on electronic things like the built-in phone book on the phone not accessible when the phone is dead and having to dig through old paperwork to find important phone numbers including those of your family and friends that you don’t know by heart so you can input them into the new phone.

• Annual doctor visit for Princess Nagger that showed an improvement from last year being that she was considered ‘underweight’ this time last year, but has gained 6-1/2 pounds and grew 1-1/2 inches.  She’s still a lightweight, but more in line with her progress from birth.

• PN and my 6-month teeth cleaning visit at the dentist resulted in no cavities for me, but revealed one cavity and an abscessed tooth (that has a filling from a previous cavity that might not have completely filled the cavity) for Princess Nagger that will need to be dealt with next Friday, along with dealing with the fact that her bottom adult teeth are for some reason starting to grow in behind her baby teeth so she’ll need to be fitted with an inner retainer on her bottom teeth now that her 6-year molars have finally come in.

But today?  Today Princess Nagger is off school so we’re going to have a picnic outside and enjoy the 80+ degree weather before heading over to the movie theater to learn how to train a dragon in 3D, followed by taking Dada out to dinner for his birthday.  Murphy and his Law can just go sulk in a corner for a while, because today is going to be a good day.