Ah, the Irony

Wrote my traditional I'm inbetween meetings at church blog post today and the iPod Touch went kerflooie. The irony will become evident shortly.

They say, of course, that bad things happen in threes. So until the iPod went frrpt, I was waiting for the other thing to go boom.

Friday night, the microwave went south. The little computron or whatever it is that makes the microwaves won't make the microwaves any longer. That means I spent the entire weekend absolutely surrounded by no microwave popcorn. I am in hell.

Then Saturday, a clicking under the hood of the van turned into a wet slapping sound that suddenly turned into more master alarms, cautions and warnings than the Apollo 13 crew got after they did their cryostir. We either lost a belt or a pulley, because everything went south as we limped the van to the mechanic -- we lost power steering, the water pump, and the alternator was going HELLLLLP! as well. So we sat there in the snow at the mechanic -- luckily we were able to get there -- trying to figure out what to do. Michelle got on the cell phone and started calling people for help, while I did my traditional guy thing by popping the hood and staring at all the hoses and wires and thingabajobbies that lie underneath. I know enough about cars that I knew the symptoms meant a lost belt, and I could see it there loose and floppy, but durned if I knew how to fix it. Liam thought the entire event -- we were all there, eating chocolate cookies -- was pretty scary. Now, I've broken down in Island Park and waaaaay out in Squirrel, Idaho, where I was lucky to only have to walk a half mile before I could find someone to help jump my battery, so being stranded in the middle of Rexburg at a mechanic's shop wasn't high on my list of scaries. Fortunately, Robert Shultz, a ward member, was in town and was able to come get us to take us home. And fortuitously, he also repairs electronics, including microwaves. He's already working on a subwoofer for us -- he wants to fix ours and then try it out to see if they make enough of a sound difference to buy one himself. He was in fact fixing the avionics on a plane at the Rexburg airport when his wife called him to tell him of our distress.

So the worst that'll happen with the microwave is that I'll be off popcorn for a few days. The worst that'll happen with the van is that it'll be in the shop for the day. And the worst that happend with the iPod going south is that I had to reset my configuration and then do this entry from scratch.

We have sooooo much to be thankful for.