When you have had enough challenges in life, you get smart. You try to forestall them. This has been a mistake for a couple of thousand years, at least.
In school, doing Latin literature, we studied the Aeneid. In this ancient tale, Aeneas and his pals go off on a very lengthy circular trip. In the last stanzas after numerous exhausting adventures they return to their own town, which, cresting the hill, they see below them.
Aeneas, explains the Latin, had done all this ‘quo fata requiras’ – as was required by fate.
The Romans knew a thing or two. Perhaps you cannot escape your fate, maybe if you try to do so all you’re doing is embarking on a long circular campaign that will bring you back to where you started with nothing resolved, with a slight possibility of being wiser and a great certainty of being utterly knackered, ‘defessus’ if you’re an ancient Roman.
Nevertheless, determined to outrun my fate and looking backward in order to leap forward, I had asked the OH at Christmas if there were a way of backing up everything that needed backing up on a laptop whose battery was, I believed, failing. I had been in this neck of the woods before. Sudden demise of a computer can be sufficiently challenging to challenge your vocabulary as well as your blood pressure.
The OH examined my store of memory sticks, mainly in the form of cartoon characters, so I can easily identify who is guarding which unpublished novel, and had a good laugh. Then he assisted me in ordering a memory stick with enough Gig to download the bank of England at least, promising to help his idiot mother to do the download, later.
Subsequently the OH went to a location at which a seller resided who had remotely sold the S&H two tyres and four wheels for a car that the S&H owns. The OH fetched the tyres, which, when they are not on the axels of a car, are a lot bigger than you think and, also, a lot heavier. He brought them to our garage and, with extreme difficulty, unloaded them to a space beside my library trolley.
There they stayed.
As anyone with adult children will tell you, they can approach any sort of grown up age you care to name, but still consider themselves to have storage rights at your address.
So it was when the electrical friend declared himself able to arrive (today) and bang holes in the garage wall through to the kitchen, I rang the S&H to tell him the garage door might be open for long periods of time and, in January, his ancient mother was unwilling, reluctant, in fact downright would not, stand outside in order to guard his tyres and wheels from muscular depredators.
Accordingly yesterday (Sunday) he arrived, set the massive memory stick to record the contents of the laptop, took his wheels with the assistance of his father, and a bag of stuff for the grandchildren (there is always a bag of stuff for the grandchildren) and departed.
When the computer grew tired of displaying the graphic illustrative of the lengths to which the backup had gone, it blanked the screen. Visible progress was restored by jiggling the mouse and pressing escape.
I am not good at computers. Wrong generation. Inevitably I just pressed escape jiglessly, whereupon the machine informed me the backup had been cancelled.
A phone call to the S&H was answered when he had driven back to Wales, had Sunday lunch, done some shopping and was ready for the gym. (This is my child, when and how and also why, did he become so active? This is my little nerd, going to a gym, do they have computers there? Have you ever been to one? Do you know?) He told me the procedure to follow so I did.
At this juncture I would have done the blog because I do try to do the blog on Sunday, every Sunday at the least. But, jiggling my mouse revealed that the backup was still in progress.
Leaving that particular dead end I essayed a load in the washing machine, expecting to have to find £160 call-out fee in January. Like everyone else we are eating bread crusts and whatever is in the tin at the back of the cupboard that the label fell off. (The tin, not the cupboard.)
And for lo! The machine worked. It did not cry, it did not behave incontinently. Oh muted hooray. Now why is that? Is it just doing it to lull me into a sense of false security? Has it eaten the hearing aid batteries and enjoyed them? Is it hoping for more loose change? Is it saving up for something?
I then tackled the kitchen. I washed, wiped, chucked out the tin tray commemorative of the Silver Jubilee with the late Queen looking very young and the Duke of Edinburgh totally erased by the bases of many mugs of tea. I left my kitchen absolutely spotless.
Overnight the computer churned away. This AM it had made no progress whatsoever apart from getting overheated underneath. This was alarming, if it wants to get overheated I would prefer it to do so after everything is backed up. I emailed the OH.
Finally, on his lunch break, he replied; upon his instruction the idiot mother wiped the memory stick and started again.
I quickly visited my own kitchen where the electrical friend was busy coating every surface with brick dust. At this juncture I was able to get behind the built-in oven with a vacuum nozzle.
I am completely amazed that we have not previously demised from Black Death at least. I have spent years wiping the surface of the cooker, utterly ignorant of the thick ropes of spider webs, builder’s rubble, unspecified dirt and enough Grease for several musicals that lurks below.
Having seen the weather forecast, I decided it would be wise to go shopping for pans that would work on an induction hob at once, despite the opinions of my intestines and psoriasis. I left the OH and the electrical friend playing in the rubble, trying to take a few millimetres off the tiled hole into which the new hob would not fit by ‘that much Jane, just that much’, using a vast number of tools the friend had brought with him, many extra tools from the OH’s shed and other items that set the fire alarms off three times.
At the out of town big supermarket I purchased the one choice of Induction hob pans without metal conductible handles and loitered in Marks and Spencers as long as I could.
I returned to find the hall was the only place to put the shopping down as the kitchen had turned into a war zone.
The rest you know, if you’ve read the blog below.
The OH, accurately reading my expression, set to work tidying up. He even washed the kitchen floor, which may have been a mistake because I now know he can do it. He had, of course failed to clean the brick dust settled in the grouting, everywhere, on all the handles, on every jar, on the kettle and the teapot, on the light switches, the kitchen windowsill and numerous other locations.
We are, however, back to where we began. We have a kitchen, it has a hob. All that remains is to spend tomorrow cleaning the garage and then putting everything back where it was.
The OH is £500 + £1.50 and five hearing aid batteries lighter in the pocket. I am out two pans, a milk pan and my favourite newish nice little ceramic frying pan which I gave to the S&H.
We are older, are we any wiser?
Is January the ideal time to skint yourself on a circular trip or was it all ‘quo fata requiras?’
I’m so defessus I couldn’t say.
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