Quite apart from my late car it's been a fine week for applied entropy around the house. The first issue has been with the dishwasher, which has decided that this whole business where it drains water at the end of the cycle is a bit too much work to expect it to do, so that the washing finishes up with about an inch in the basin. When this first started my father pointed out, in belabored tones, how it was essential that I scrape the food off all dishes, including the cat dishes, put in lest it get clogged up and he be forced to drain the dishwasher by hand. That's certainly well-taken advice except that I don't put plates with appreciable chunks of food into the dishwasher, whether the few that I use myself or the more that the cats use. Still, the food chunks have been cleared out and it's still flooding, so I don't know what my parents are going to do about it.
They might just replace it --- we keep having trouble with this dishwasher --- but then on Thursday morning after I'd got my cheese sticks out of the fridge my mother noticed a serious problem with the refrigerator. Specifically, it was about sixty degrees in there. How I failed to notice this when I took my cheese out I don't know. In fact, I somehow failed to connect the temperatures to the slightly warmer and greasier texture of the processed cheddar product that I did eat, although I figured it out after breakfast. (Friday morning I had granola bars for breakfast instead.)
Over the day my father got some dry ice to put in the fridge, a fact which he told me at roughly forty-minute intervals while stressing how important it was I only put in or take out things efficiently because of the dry ice, which he put in the fridge, which he got over the day, because the dry ice would provide cold, as long as it was in the fridge, so the door should not be opened too much, because of the dry ice. Also my parents cleaned all the magnets, clippings, calendar (which I really must write about sometime), and stuff taped to it. It looks so much more enormous while bare.
I don't know what's to become of it, but I do suspect that when I get back home there'll be something different in the kitchen, and the cats may have even stopped staring at it disapprovingly by that time.
Trivia: To extend their patent on James Watt's steamengines in 1775, Boulton and Watt lobbied for a new Act of Parliament, rather than a new patent, because an Act would cost £110 to process while a new patent would be £130. Source: Watt's Perfect Engine: Steam and The Age Of Invention, Ben Marsden.
Currently Reading: Alice, Let's Eat, Calvin Trillin. I'm really not the reader for this. For a start I usually find Calvin Trillin vaguely amusing but not really particularly funny, and for another, it's about food. I know there are people endlessly fascinated by every aspect of food; I'm not among them.