Ponder: One Thing Leads to Another

My county in California has just issued a shelter in place mandate staring midnight tonight 3/16/20 lasting for the next three weeks due to the coronavirus COVID-19. I can be productive during this hiatus by using my time to sew, declutter, tidy, read the news ad nauseam; but I can also relax and entertain myself  by watching movies, reading, or also by looking through my blog and see if there are any draft posts languishing that I never finished nor published. I was surprised to find one that was last touched March 1, 2016. Yes. Four years ago. I was about to delete it but then reading it brought a smile to my face so I thought I would share.

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A few weeks ago the plastic beaded cord loop snapped on a sun screening roller shade in our kitchen nook. Two ends were flapping in the breeze per se as they hung there but the shade still functioned to raise and lower it. Frank attached two mini-binder clips to act as end grips and we ignored the problem. The UV sun rays must have been doing their work as each of the five shades began failing one by one within days of each other. After the one in the nook, a few days later, two other roller shades in the kitchen broke in the same manner. They were over the sink however and I could not reach the ends of the cords when they were in the higher position. It was time to stop ignoring the issue.

I went online to a great site I've used in the past called Fix My Blinds. It has every part you could imagine - the correct thickness of cord, spoked wheels, clear wands, bottom plugs, etc. I ordered enough length of the beaded cord in the correct diameter and spacing of beads (there are several options) and the joining couplers to recreate a loop for each of the five windows. I usually like the philosophy "if it ain't broke don't fix it" but realistically, the other two were probably due to break really soon. Fortunately the box of repair parts arrived in less than a week for minimal postage, too. In the interim I had to keep dragging over a chair to reach, or calling Frank to adjust the shade position, or keep squinting and getting a headache, or live in darkness with them in the down position. The setting sun blaring in through our windows can be very strong.

To fix the blinds Frank had to take down the curtain valances. I noticed that instead of white they were a filthy grey, so covered with dust they were.  I knew enough to put them in the dryer first to dust them off instead of immersing them in water and creating a charcoal colored sludge on their surface. So far so good. I then popped them in the washer – and promptly forgot I'd put them there until a day and a half later when I went to do a load of laundry, opened the lid and – surprise, there they were. But they were not sitting all pressed out to the edges of the drum as after the spin cycle. Oh, no. Not that simple. The washer was still full. Something with the timer or another part had broken and the water level was near the top. The water was still sudsy too so I knew it had never made it to the rinse cycle. At least the curtains got a good soak.

We had been living several weeks with an intermittently functioning agitator. That is annoying but you really cannot fix something until it is truly broken or repeats the malfunction consistently. Water fill and draining had not been a concern. Now the washer was truly broken. I was not about to hand rinse the valances from five windows so I stood at the washer and clicked the timer control manually a small angular rotation at a time and babied the load through drain, refill, rinse, drain, and spin by jumping to a different segment on the dial, within whatever type of wash cycle and wherever within that cycle I could find a functioning feature of choice. With persistence I was successful.

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So where am I today, four years later? New curtains. New appliances. The curtains were hung again shortly after the blinds were fixed, although, since then, they have been replaced in the nook but not in the kitchen.

Not one to throw away anything, those white curtains with the red embroidery still linger in my overcrowded, junked-up linen closet, which is in need of a good purging.

That washer had to be repaired again, as described in my 5/24/18 post titled Appliance Woes only to break once again, less than a year later. We bought a new washer/dryer pair and they were installed 3/16/19. Six months later on 9/16/19 the dryer needed to be repaired for the second time because it was cooking the clothes independent of the heat setting. The repair man told me there was nothing wrong. I said that was not true; he could not find what was wrong. So they replaced all the parts. Works like a charm now. Today is the washer/dryer's one year anniversary.