Dream with Our Eyes Open

So this is how our (Memorial Day) holiday weekend ended:

1. We discovered that our refrigerator has died (just before I went off to go grocery shopping, which I suppose beats having it happen after I returned with the groceries) and

2. While I was ordering a new fridge online, we discovered that the attic exhaust fan had burned itself up.

The second event was definitely the more melodramatic. The Mr. called down from upstairs "I smell plastic burning!" The Young Lady (who was going to accompany me to the grocery store) and I called back "nothing is burning down here!" We all snooped around the upper floor and found nothing burning, but the smell was definitely stronger around the ceiling vents (where the house air conditioning comes out). The Mr. got a ladder from the basement, put on his headlamp (don't laugh - it's a very useful item in many circumstances), climbed up to the ceiling hatch for the attic, popped the hatch, and yelled "Get a fire extinguisher!" I fetched one from the kitchen, and he put out the (small but smelly) fire and disconnected the fan.

Meanwhile, we have hooked up the Young Lady's half-height fridge (just recently retrieved from her university dorm) and are trying to decide what is worthy of being moved into it. The volume is probably only a quarter of the larger unit's, and even less in the freezer compartment.

I guess something else could still happen - there's more than 3 hours of holiday weekend left!

I mean, WTF? I'm used to having ants in the kitchen in the spring and in the fall. It's one of the prices you pay for living in a cool old house in a neighborhood where lots of the homeowners are passionate about not using gobs of pesticides in their yards.

But ants in February? While the snow is pelting down? Nuh-uh. What are these, special cold-resistant Boreal ants imported from Canada?

D-:

And while we're at it, WTF snow again??? And more in Friday night? The National Weather Service is not usually confidant enough to say 90% chance of snow this far ahead of time - but that's what they're saying!

Our office building connects to Union Station, Washington's main RR station. Like most large modern stations, it's like a shopping mall inside, with restaurants and shops, so I usually go there to buy lunch and (before that) to walk rapidly around the ground and upper levels, so that I get a little exercise break.

It's Cherry Blossom Festival, so the place is crawling with tour group mobs, many of them older school children (middle school on up). And their chaperones have enough on their minds that they simply can't seem to keep their mobs from blocking the corridors ... it makes walking more toilsome than it oughter be ...

And of course it's that matzoh time of year again ... when everything's a little more cardboard-y ... .

So all in all, your humble correspondent feels a tendency to bitch-bitch-bitch. > slaps self < Snap out of it!