The Honest Courtesan

Though I prefer country life, it isn’t without its peculiar issues and problems, and we had several last week.  Normally, we only need to change the water filter about once per season, but since we changed out our pump at the beginning of August, that kicked up considerable sediment, rust, and the like which has required two filter changes in only 3 months.  That woud’ve been no big deal, except for that fact that modern filter housings are made as cheaply and shabbily as possible, with “heavy duty mounting brackets” so flimsy I can bend the metal in my dainty little hands.  What this means is that if the housing gets stuck (which I find happens at least every few years), there’s essentially no way to remove it without breaking the PVC pipes.  So this time I bought some heavy angle iron so Grace could build a truly heavy bracket, though I still had to buy another overpriced, underbuilt housing.  While that process was going on, the washing machine gave up the ghost, and when I went to buy a new one I was told nobody bothers to stock them any more (we tried a number of stores in two counties), so if I wanted one, I’d need to order it now and it might be delivered by Christmas (if the supply chain cooperates).  So last Monday I had to waste the one day that week it didn’t rain to figure this out and buy a new-to-me used washer-dryer set.  Then that evening at dinner, the lights went out and the generator came on; that was fine, but two hours later my intuition started pinging so I called the power company and found out there wasn’t an outage.  The transfer switch had developed a fault (according to customer service, a common problem with new installations) that caused the main service cutoff to trip every time we hit it with a heavy load (like if the pump comes on while the water heater is running, something that happens about 15 minutes after I start taking what I think will be a nice, hot shower).  I made an appointment with the service company to fix it, but he wasn’t able to get here until yesterday, which meant a week of carefully planning appliance use so big-ticket items didn’t come on at the same time and trip the cutoff again, forcing me to stand in the rain, in the dark, to throw it on again (after letting it cool for five minutes or more with the power off, at night).  And when he looked at it yesterday, he determined he’d need to replace the whole switch…which means waiting another week for the part to arrive.  So as you can imagine, it has all been very stressful and costly, and if you want to help me cover the expenses (or just some edibles so I can relax) I’d appreciate it.  If you’re wondering what Cicero has to do with any of this, the answer is “nothing at all”; it’s just a much cuter picture than one of an old washing machine.