The Beat Goes On

Linda suggested a sacrifice to the plumbing gods to help the situation from my last blog but it turned out that the water was coming from the refrigerator so I made a blood sacrifice to the appliance gods along with $82 dollars to replace the leaky solenoid that feeds water to the ice maker. Problem solved.

We enjoyed a whole three days with nothing breaking down or leaking then came Tuesday morning. I was barely out of bed when Babs said, "The dryer quit." "Oh, and your Lazy Boy is broken." Really? Do I have my own personal rain cloud following me around?

It turns out that the dryer had been beeping for some time and the only way to make the beeping stop was to unplug it. Then it started beeping while it was drying. The fix for that was to give it a whack. It seems the whacks were so effective that it stopped working altogether.

I couldn't dissuade Babs from dismantling the thing so she did it while I was at work. Re-assembly didn't fix it so we had Benjamin come take a look at it since it used to belong to him. He said the beeps meant something was wrong (go figure). A quick peek on the internet proved him correct. In fact it said that eventually the dryer would stop working (duh). Problem? The controller board.

Summoning my paltry internet skills, I was able to find a replacement board for $121 directly from Sears. Since I didn't know how long it would take to ship it here or what the charges would be, I reverted to old school and went to a parts place that Benjamin suggested. They had a board in their Tempe store but it cost $132. I said I'd just get the one on line but she (the clerk) said I could have theirs for $117. Sold, to the man in the yellow hat. As I write this itt should be somewhere between Tempe and Tucson so we may be drying clothes by the weekend.

The Lazy Boy news is not as good. They guaranty them forever so all we have to pay for is labor, $60 worth of labor. That's bearable but the kicker is that the part to fix it could take EIGHT weeks to get here. It must be custom made in Tibet by 117 year old blind monks and shipped by asthmatic yaks.

So here I sit, on a camp chair with my feet propped up on a folding chair from the dining room. It could be a long eight weeks.