When It Rains...

So yeah, today was one of those days.

First off, Sophie got up at the arsecrack of dawn. Again. And since I was insomnia-bound again last night, waking up every few hours worried that I was sleeping through her hacking cough, I didn't exactly bounce out of bed well rested. She's had a phlegmy, nasty cough the last week or so that has gotten progressively worse. I finally took her to the doctor yesterday, only to be told that there was really nothing they could do. The good news was that evidently I had been doing all the right things. Honey, chamomile tea, Vaporub, humidifier.

When we came downstairs this morning, the ceiling in the living room was leaking. We have a cape cod and one of the dormer windows is right over the living room. This happened a month or so ago and Neil went out and cleaned the gutters and it seemed to fix the problem. We thought it might be backing up in under the flashing. But that did not fix it today. Which means that it is a much bigger problem. And bigger problems with roofs mean $$.

Finally, as my twitter and FB friends know, our big tv died last week. It's a 62" rear projection tv and the bulb blew up. Like, BLEW. UP. Loud noise. Shattered glass. While this is not great, it wasn't completely unexpected. These tv's need new bulbs every so often. So we ordered a new bulb. Which is not cheap, but a whole heck of a lot cheaper than a new tv. And since this tv is not even three years old, we're not ready for a new one. We ordered two bulbs, figuring that it would be nice to have an extra one, plus it saves on shipping. We got it the next day and Neil popped the new bulb right in. Fixed.

Wrong.

The next day it went black. No picture. We called a tv repairman and he came out that afternoon. He charged us $60 to open and close the tv panel and somehow it worked again. For about a day. And then the bulb blew up. AGAIN. So, thinking, foolishly it now seems, that something must have been wrong with the first bulb, we put in our last bulb. Fixed.

Wrong.

The next day, that bulb blew, too. So that's $400 worth of bulbs in two days. We called out the repairman. Again. He came out this morning and once he opened up the tv, he found that something was wrong with the ballast, which I guess is the power supply for the lamp unit. The guy was Russian (da!), quite odiferous (nyet!) and more than a little difficult to understand. Not that he didn't do a great job, it just meant that communication was challenging. So $500 later, we have a new ballast, a new bulb and a very stinky tv room.

So that's $900 on our tv and god only knows how much the roof is going to wind up costing. Not to mention we had to fix my car a couple of weeks ago. All this right before Christmas.

I need to get the lead out of my ass and get our tree up so I can get some holiday spirit. Because as of right now? I am NOT feeling it.