When It Rains, It Pours

As the old saying goes, when it rains, it pours. That's been true for me the past week or so. First, my computer started acting up. It was going slow, barely chugging along and the spinning wheel of death was my constant companion. It got to the point where it just wouldn't function.. at all. It was awful.

My husband was optimistic. He thought he'd just run the disk utility and all would be well. The disk utility found hundreds of errors with iTunes. That seemed promising, so we faithfully restarted and waited... and waited... and waited. It still ran slow. He reset the PRAM and some other crazy thing that only computer geeks know about using ultra-secret key combinations during start up. Nothing worked. Finally, in a fit of anger he said we'd reinstall the OS. We tried... and we got an error. It couldn't be installed. It said we could try again, so we did and this time the error came up even earlier. This wasn't a good sign. Finally, on the 4th try it worked and I was able to restart, hoping my computer troubles would finally be over. Nope. No such luck.

At this point, it was pretty clear we had a bigger issue than either of us wanted to deal with. My husband sighed and resigned to the fact that it was my hard drive. At this point the newsletter I produce every month for the Moms Club was several days late and the hate mail started to flow in. Wonderful! We got a new hard drive and spent all of Friday night working to backup his hard drive on his computer, install the new drive in his computer, transfer the files to the new drive, backup my computer, wipe his old hard drive, and then transfer all my files to his hard drive. That was super time consuming and of course we ran into as snag - my computer couldn't even backup the hard drive. It wasn't recognizing the external drive we were backing it up to... so I lost everything between October 3rd and Friday night.

Saturday we spent traveling to family functions. Sunday, I got up early and began to do my chores. My washing machine has been loud since the day I bought it, but lately it has been REALLY loud. I threw a load of clothes in to wash and part way through the final spin cycle, it kicked the bucket. Literally - the drum dropped into the basket. At the same time, something locked and you couldn't turn the drum by hand anymore. The clothes only made it through part of a spin cycle, so they were soaking wet. I knew from Googling and talking to other moms that repairing a bearing or locked drum on a front-loader was more expensive than replacing the machine, so off to the store we went.

I was determined to not spend too much, so I was looking at clearance models. Front loaders are horribly expensive these days! I couldn't find anything in our price range, not even clearance models. When we bought our set, we paid $599 per piece and it wasn't the bottom of the line machine either. Now, they seem to start around $799 and they go way up from there. A cheaper alternative is the top loader HE machine. We tried 3 stores and at our final stop I found a beautiful LG top loading HE machine with all the bells and whistles a girl could want on clearance (it was a return) for $449. The original price was $999. WOW, what a deal!

Here's the funny part - that deal was at Sears. The store I swore I'd never ever shop at again. Well, they redeemed themselves a little with that one. The salesman was very nice and they got it off the floor and to the loading dock in under 10 minutes. We were there about an hour before they closed on a Sunday and nobody seemed to be hurrying us along. It was a nice change compared to the snow blower incident of 2013. I declined the extra protection plan though because quite honestly, I don't want to deal with the Sears repair team. No thanks!

So that's my tale - first the computer, then the washer. About $700 later, we were back in business. Oy!