"Home" Work

Despite our astronomical rent, our apartment has lots of "quirks". Things need fixing and tending to. Over the past couple of weeks I have had to:

• Deal with the return of "Miguelito" - our unwelcome rodent guest. This involved setting up multiple traps (stick and snap). After several appearances, he seems to have gotten the hint and moved to other quarters without having to lose a limb or worse.
• Take our fridge apart to figure out why the freezer was working but the fridge wasn't. The problem was that despite the lack of frost in the freezer, the vents between the freezer and the fridge got clogged with ice.
• Learn how to fix a leaky tub faucet. I still need to get some tools to address the problem, but I think I know how now.

You may wonder why I don't call the "super" (aka the building superintendent who lives on site and should be responsible for these things) and have these things taken care of.

1. From the stories I have heard from other tenants, he is not very reliable and it often takes several tries for him to get it right. From what I have seen in our bathroom, his work is not very good (it was patched up before we moved in).
2. Trying to coordinate a visit with our schedules and the dogs is too much of a headache.
3. I should learn how to do these things anyway.

In addition to these home duties, I have also been training as a iMac repair person. With all the crashes and errors I have experienced, as well as the calls to tech support, I have become a pseudo expert. I think I have isolated the problem: either one of my memory cards is bad or one of the slots is bad.

So my vacation is coming to an end - back to work next week - and I am tied up with home duties. Actually work already started as I have been putting in many hours working on my courses this past week. These four weeks "off" have really flown by. I could use another four.