Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e're having a fairly big barbeque on Saturday for all the combined summertime birthdays so all the grandchildren will be here.  As luck would have it, about a week before we are having people over to eat some food, our oven broke.  After waiting on parts to arrive and for me to squeeze in some time and effort in fixing it, we finally have a working oven again. We've been sort of neglecting the oven since COVID so it needed some work.  In order to replace this part, I had to disassemble quite a bit of the oven.  While I had the oven disassembled, I decided to give it a good cleaning too.  We can actually see through the glass door now!   This was a last minute task for today before dinner.  I was only about 30 minutes late with dinner tonight so this task wasn't too time consuming.  It was a pretty dirty and disgusting task though. Most of the day was spent programming my large scale steam locomotive.  I've spent quite a bit of time on ...

Actually, the last two weeks of 2017 and the first three weeks (so far) of 2018 have been exceptionally lousy but this is giving me a very uneasy feeling about this new year.  In our case, it seems that things are constantly breaking. If it is not one thing, it is another. Touch this... it breaks. Look at something else... it breaks. Fix something... turn around and there are two other things broken. The list is so long at this point that I can't even remember everything that has broken in the past four weeks! The first two problems I can remember four weeks ago were related to our electrical and our furnace.  Our electronics were all acting a bit odd and quirky. Things were shutting down on their own. Other things weren't working correctly. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting with an electronics tester, I found myself at our circuit-breaker panel with the cover off testing the monster main lines coming into the house (something I'd prefer to avoid) ... the vol...