Last night Blogger dumped an entry after I posted it (no matter, this one replaces it.) But that was just another in a series of weird technical difficulties we had on coming home.
The taxi pulled into the drive by the house yesterday (Sunday), and Peter jumped out to have a look at the fishpond…and saw that the fountain wasn’t running. We both said “Uh, oh…” in unison, since this was the first symptom of the week-long power failure our house had last year when we were in the US.
Heading into the house, we found that there had indeed been some massive power surge that had flipped the circuit breaker on the main house “board”, about four o’clock on Friday. We flipped the circuit-breaker, and things came back on…mostly. The food in the freezer was OK: only a little ice in the topmost shelf had melted…that thing has good insulation. But the freezer’s sensor chip seems to have been fried, in that it doesn’t know what temperature it is inside any more, and every now and then triggers its “power loss” alarm, screaming in ill-founded frustration. Additionally, when Peter went upstairs to reset the clocks and so forth, he discovered that his computer’s power source had also been fried. (At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. Push the button, no power. The cord’s not at fault, and neither is the plug [note to non-UK and Irish users: plugs here have fuses in them]. Seems to me that if the power source was OK and the motherboard was fried, we would at least get the power source’s fan coming on, but nothing further, or a screwy POST, or whatever.) What joy.
Talking to our neighbor Mary (who kennels the cats for us when we’re on extended trips) we find that the area suffered extensive and unusual lightning storms for a couple of the days we were away; so that might have been responsible for Peter’s blowout…and if it was, we should be lucky that nothing else got blown up. But now we have to call the Bosch people in to replace the freezer’s sensor chip, and I have to find out whether I can get P. a new power source locally that’ll suit his present motherboard, or whether I have to send back to Scan in the UK for it. Either way, his machine’s going to be down for days. He’s got his old laptop hooked up to his monitor and his various other peripherals, so that’s OK…for the moment.
But there’s one cheerful thing about this, in our “household mythology”. It probably means there’s money on the way in, because that’s always when the electronics around here start to die…
