My Mum and I always joke that every time her husband goes away off-shore – that’s when everything in the house breaks down.

Before Christmas I switched on the lights on the stairs – 3 out of 5 of them blew all in one go, plus all the lights in my room (thank goodness for bedside lamps and Christmas tree lights…but I quickly discovered putting on make up this kinda lighting is not a good plan…)

Well, in this 2 week stint the following challenges have met us…

1. The cupboard above the oven

I discovered this when I came down for ‘breakfast/lunch’ one morning. I quickly realised that this was a heavy door and just poised to crash down on someone’s head, because it had come off it’s hinges on one side. So after searching the house for a screwdriver & step ladder, in my pyjamas I balanced the door on my head and unscrewed the other hinge to take off the door.

2. The broken phone line

My Mum came home on the day of the cupboard door incident, her mobile having run out of battery. She tried to call her friend (who was coming round) to say she could make her way round now. No dialling tone.

‘Try my phone’ I said.

Niente.

So we looked up Virgin Media’s helpline number again. (Do we know our account details of what her husband set up? Nope) we then discovered that to get assistance they insisted you call from your Virgin Media phone.

They hung up on my Mum calling from her (Virgin) Mobile no less than 3 times.

3 days later, I was finally home and not working so I got the joy of finding the right combination of ‘press 1…press 2…press 1…please hold…we’ll transfer you…’ to finally speak to some random dude in India who didn’t understand a word I was saying.

2 days after that I waited for the Virgin Media guy who would come round between 8 a.m.-12 p.m. and luckily I was still in at 2.25 p.m. when someone eventually arrived.

Apparently the person who put the cable in didn’t bury it under our drive properly so we wait for someone to come dig up our driveway and put in a new cable.

3. The dishwasher.

Technically this pre-dates the current away status, but our dishwasher currently permeates a stench something akin to smelly feet. I have hit it with soda crystals, cleaned out the filter twice (finding broken glass in the process?!), dishwasher freshener & one of those dishwasher cleaning things (£4!!!!). The latter did make it smell nice for about an hour before the smelly feet stink returned.

Yuk.

4. The boiler

We woke up with no heating or hot water one morning. I went out to the boiler which is in the garage (in wellies and pyjamas) to discover the pressure was at 0.4 (I don’t know what it measures, I just now the pressure needs to be at least 1 for boilers to work). there were a million pipes and valves.

That night my Mum’s husband called her mobile (yep this is when we still had no phone line…adds to the challenge!) and guided me through which pipe/valve was which. I followed the instructions, all was well until all of a sudden the thing when nuts. The pipes and house were shaking, the valves wouldn’t turn off, I started screaming and panicking (if you heard the noise, and knew it was being caused by a gas pipe you’d understand) thinking that I might just have caused a gas explosion…until we eventually found the power switch.

And then we called the plumber/central heating guy.

After a night of broken sleep (our house was something akin to an icebox…how do eskimos cope?!) the plumber man came and saved the day.

Apparently it was all because there was ice in one of the pipes. And our boiler was not broken and gone forever.

Phew.

5. The disappearing TV Channels

I have a TV again. It worked, it was exciting. Until one day the channels I watch disappeared.

Retuned and some came back, and others disappeared.

My Mum’s TV has also started doing a weird ‘jumpy’ thing where the sound will suddenly dissappear or picture will disappear.

So now we can play a game called ‘Guess the channels’. Basically you guess which channels you think will be there/not be there before you switch on the TV.

Personally ~I think my one is possessed by something very sadistic and downright mean. I don’t watch an awful lot of TV – just certain shows that are on once a week which I really love at the moment it’s Brothers& Sisters and NCIS. So on Thursday, the season premiere of B&S I retuned, got More4 channel working. All was fine until 2 mins before B&S came on. Then it broke, froze and disappeared.

Not a happy koala.

Same thing happened when I switched on to watch Home & Away while getting ready for work the other day. All fine until Home  & Away came on…

Sigh.

6. The leaky washing machine

This morning’s fun. Somehow one of my tops had got caught in the doorseal while being washed in the washing machine. So of course the washing machine starts emitting a flow of water from the door.

Some frantic tea towel mopping to catch, and then lots of button pressing to get the washing machine to skip the soaping and spinning to the ‘draining part’ to prevent our kitchen from becoming an indoor pond.

Mission accomplished.

Now keeping watchful eye on the washing machine.

So there you have it. This current stay has been shall we say, character building.

Obviously all these things are not a huge deal, and really in the great grand scheme of things so teeny-tiny minor irritations when you think of what other challenges people around the world are dealing with that we could be righteously angry about.

I still have shelter (and now heated shelter again…thank you Jesus!!!), food, drinkable water and so many luxuries. I have much to be thankful for.

But yes, it still caused much grrring, cursing, sighing and a few small rants from my Mum and I. Oh, and much laughing, because that’s what we do best in times of ‘crisis’ after we’ve got our wee rants out of our systems!