Everything is Brokeded...Again

Back in November I blogged about the time we were having with EVERYTHING we owned breaking. During that time my children had a deep discussion about things being a little "brokeded" or all the way "brokeded". Apparently it is that time again.

First, it was the dryer. Let me tell you about our dryer. My dad got it from a guy he knew who fixed old dryers when we got married. It was actually an old commercial laundry mat dryer and even though we didn't have to pay, I still had to push the change thing in to start it! That dryer had to have been 20 years old when we got it. We knew that the time was coming for a new one. It had gotten to the point that it took about 8 hours to dry one load of clothes. Seriously. One day I am going to write about how my family has personally created the energy crisis in this country, but I'll save that for another day. Anyway, last Thursday that dryer dried it's last load of clothes. It was a good dryer. It hung in there, I'll say that. I'm guessing in the seven years we had it that it dried 5 times more clothes than when it was getting paid at the laundry mat. We had been planning to get a new one as soon as our tax return got here, and that faithful dryer waited until the very week it came to die. Wasn't that thoughtful?

Then, the internet quit working. I was convinced I had just worn it out because I have been online so much lately. I'll be honest. During this time I realized that doing laundry and playing online occupy a huge amount of my life. If just the dryer had died I could've played online without feeling like I should be doing laundry. If just the internet had gone out I might have actually gotten some laundry done.

Josh came home Monday night with a new (used) dryer. It had all kinds of fancy things our other one did not have. Of course this one did not have a change slot. :) I was so impressed that Josh had loaded it in the truck and then was able to get it in the house and unload the old one and set up the new one. I supervised. We recently rented a storage unit because we felt it would be best to pay money to store all of the junk we have rather than going through it and the laundry room looks like a new place! You just don't understand. Before it was our mini garage and it was STUFFED to the max with boxes. We moved into this house the week before Christmas and anything we didn't feel like dealing with we crammed into that room. I am not kidding you when I tell you that I could not fit in the laundry room at the end of my pregnancy. That's bad, y'all!! Well, it got cleaned out and me and the laundry basket can fit in it now. But we hooked up the new dryer and I smelled something burning. I didn't have the heart to tell Josh who had made an hour long trip and then did all of that moving and loading and unloading. But, sure enough, it wasn't drying our clothes either.

He decided he would pack it up and take it back. Thankfully it came with a warranty. Then Josh sat down for a duel with the computer. We have a satellite for our internet and we thought the weather being bad was what was causing the problems, but we figured out it wasn't. The problem was we couldn't figure out what was the problem. I watched Josh adjust and readjust our wireless router and talk to 50 different tech support people. I think I literally saw him beating his head on the couch a few times.

Well, we got the dryer fixed (after Josh reloaded it, made the hour trip to the place and the hour trip back and reloaded it back into the laundry room) and I have been on marathon laundry duty since. I was so excited about my new, clean laundry room that I got a broom and mop organizer to hang on the wall. It wasn't a pretty sight, me trying to get it up there, and I'm thankful that the wall didn't get brokeded, but it's up! I have great dreams of being like those girls on Trading Spaces who can just hang up shelf or throw a piece of furniture together like nobody's business. But...I'm not there. I was so proud of my handiwork and went in the kitchen to get the broom and guess what was in the garbage? My broom. Broken in half. In the time it took me to hang the broom organizer, my kids broke the broom!

I thought I handled all of this pretty well for me, but I'll tell you what did me in. Pencils. You have to understand this about Sarah. She is obsessive compulsive about her pencils. I've never seen anything like it . It has to be sharpened to exactly the point she likes. Well, Josh had come home early to pick up the dryer and I was in the kitchen helping Sarah with her schoolwork. I was trying to erase something and the eraser just flew off the pencil! That was my breaking point! We have 400 pencils in this house and either they won't sharpen right or they don't have an eraser! Is it too much to ask for a decent pencil??? Luckily by that point Josh and I just started cracking up. What else can you do? I was ready to go make a public disturbance but couldn't you see the preacher's wife ending up in jail? "So what made you do it Mrs. Preacher's Wife?" "It was the pencils!! They just didn't work!!"

So...now you know what's been going on at the Fidler house this week. I call them Fidler Fiasco Weeks. Yes, we've had enough to name them. I would have posted some pictures of my new dryer and cleaned up laundry room, but you guessed it...my camera is brokeded. :)