We’re rich!

This weekend we saved $1,500. We’re rich! Now I can buy my new camera, right? …Right?

When we were living in New Mexico, I decided that I wanted a new computer. Now, at the time, we had more money than we knew what to do with (literally; we are still coming across ridiculous things we bought when we were there Just Because We Could) and it would have been the work of a moment to find a nice Dell laptop, order it, and watch it arrive within two days. But nooo. I was too impatient, and I wanted it RIGHT NOW, and so we went out, found a Sony VAIO (PCG-GRV680) with all the trimmings, and took it home that night.

After a couple of months, it began to overheat. I was disappointed, but it was still under warranty, so I figured we’d send it away, it’d come back, no problem. (When we had the Dell? A person drove 60 miles to our house and fixed it. Twice. FOR FREE.) I sent it away. They reinstalled Windows and sent it back. I called them again. I sent it away again. They fixed it. When it happened again, I sent it away for a third time.

Then it happened last week. Again.

Did I mention how steady the Dell was?

Because the laptop was no longer under Sony warranty, I was faced with trying to convince the American company that held our extended warranty that they should honor it, even though we now live in Canada, or having the repairs done locally and paying through the nose. Neither option was particularly appealing, and Todd and I decided if we couldn’t convince the American company to honor the extended warranty, we’d go ahead and pick up some no-name desktop for a thousand bucks and be happy with it.

The next day, Todd called me from work. “I think I may be on to something!” he said. “This time I found references online to other people having the same overheating problem. Try vacuuming it.”

“With…a real vacuum?”

“Yeah! With the hose attachment. That should get all the cat hair and dust out, and that might be what’s causing the problem.”

Paul and I had a great time vacuuming the laptop, and when we started it back up, it was blessedly quiet for the first time in weeks. Thinking we’d fixed the damn thing, I was all but dancing in my seat, and then, of course, it overheated again.

So now, I was pretty sure that I’d broken the fan with my exuberant vacuuming, and that it was going to be even more expensive to fix. I turned it off, determined to ignore the whole issue, and Paul and I set about doing the laundry. After we’d put the clothes in the washer (and I’d finished giggling over the “For hygiene reasons, we ask that you do not bring your pets into the laundry room,” sign, which you’d think would be as patantly obvious as the “do not ingest orally” warning on a box of fishhooks, but the last time I was in there I heard a woman saying, “C’mon honey, don’t be scared, come over here, yus yus, you can do it!” and I smiled in advance, thinking I was about to see a toddler feeling nervous about the loud washers, but the smile fell abruptly off my face as I came around the corner and saw a hideous little hairless yip dog, shaking in that way they do just before they pee all over everything in sight) - anyway.

After we’d put the clothes in the washer and come back upstairs, Paul spotted an advertisement for a ballet featuring the story of Cinderella. “Oh, Mama,” he said, eyes shining, “Can we please go see it?”

(So if you’ve ever seen the show Kids in the Hall, you know it mocked religious conservatives relentlessly and made merciless fun of homophobes. It’s part of why I enjoy watching the show so much - though never so much as I do now that Todd and I can rent the first season dvd and try to figure out where in Toronto each outdoor scene was filmed. There’s this scene in which the conservative, sexist dad and his wife are getting ready to go on a trip, and the dad is trying and trying to leave, but the mom is occupied with trying to make sure the son has everything he needs, and the dad is waiting in the car and then finally comes back and says, “Fran! Have you turned the boy into a f-g yet?!” and I died laughing the first time I saw it, and when Paul begged to go to the ballet that line ran through my head and I had a little giggle fit inside my head. I love how unselfconscious Paul is about stupid gender boundaries.)

We were in luck; it turned out that someone needed to get rid of their extra tickets for a show that was starting that very afternoon. I decided to spread the laundry on the floor in Paul’s room and close the door, and hope it would dry out by the time we came home. My cold was getting better, and I figured I was up for a ride on the subway and a couple of hours sitting in a theatre.

The ballet was amazing. Paul loved it - and was even more excited when he saw the men come out to dance with pumpkins on their heads. After a year of community theater in New Mexico, I’d forgotten was professional theatre was like. When it was over, Paul had a meltdown over my refusal to buy the Cinderella book they had on sale (later I found out it was because he was sure the pumpkinhead dancers were in it; I told him I was pretty sure they’d come up with that idea specifically for the ballet) and then we went downstairs to wait in line for the disabled bathroom.

Most places these days have disabled bathrooms that double as family bathrooms. At least, when I ask where the family bathroom is, that’s where they’ll point me. So I felt a little weird standing in line behind a woman standing hunched over her cane, and then even weirder when another woman with a cane came and stood behind me. I nudged Paul out of line. “Oh,” I said, “You go first.”

She smiled at me. “Really? Thank you, dear. Thank you. It’s just - if I don’t get there soon enough, I dissolve!”

Paul and I stood behind the two women and I listened to them talk about how mad they got when people who weren’t disabled used the disabled bathrooms. I was tempted to say something like, “Don’t they sort of double as the family bathrooms?” and, “We try to be as fast as we can, and as you saw, we don’t stand in front of anyone in line,” but I wasn’t up for getting into a giant debate with Paul on how now he felt like he wasn’t able to use these bathrooms either.

By the time we were ready to leave the theatre, almost everyone else had gone, and the dancers were leaving. They swanned around the lobby, looking meaningfully at people, like, “Wouldn’t you like to tell me what a lovely job I did?” but no one talked to them. Hee.

When we arrived home, I could see that my laundry idea hadn’t worked at all. But by that time my cold was so much worse that I couldn’t bring myself to care. After a night spent dozing fitfully in a chair, then getting a sore throat so painful that it actually woke me up, I decided to stay inside doing absolutely nothing until I felt better. The next day, Saturday, Todd told me that the air quality had been so bad that it had made the news, and that being outside in the heat of the afternoon had probably made my cold that much worse.

Todd decided to find out if the laptop fan was truly broken, and, armed with precision screwdrivers and canned air, he and Paul took the laptop apart.It was filthy inside. The fan wasn’t even broken; it turned out that by vacuuming it, I’d simply consolidated the cat hair and dust until the fan wasn’t able to move at all. Todd was able to clean it all up on his own, and that’s why I am typing on my VAIO instead of some no-name desktop.

Next, he decided to do the laundry. He packed it all into the shopping cart and headed off to the laundry room. When he arrived back upstairs, he was laughing. “Oh my god,” he said. “Those clothes seriously stink. I’m just glad no one had to ride down in the elevator with me. I think we’re going to have to replace the clothes.”

The laundry load was gigantic; all of my pants, most of Paul’s clothes, and a large portion of Todd’s work clothes were in there. We worked it out, and figured that it was probably going to take about five hundred dollars to replace everything. We were somewhat glum (though too giddy at having solved the laptop problem to really let it effect us) and relieved when the dryer miraculously eradicated the smell entirely.

So. There you have it. $1,500 saved, a computer we finally know how to fix, and a wardrobe of clean clothes. All in all, a success.