Everything is Broken

Stuff is breaking left and right. The hydraulic steering on my tractor failed, spraying a fine mist of oil onto my new parking area. And because there is one hydraulic pump for the whole tractor it means nothing works at the moment. I extricated the deceptively heavy item from under the dash and brought it into John Deere for rebuilding.

My truck's fuel return lines seem to be slowly degrading in their bath of biodiesel. I have to replace them before they decide to start leaking. There may be a small oil leak from the rear of the engine block.

My little two-computer home wireless network decided it had had enough after 15 months, and has gone on strike. 24 hours of pleading and cajoling have led to no concessions. As of this moment talks have broken down completely, and I've locked it out.

One of two memory slots in my other computer died, and occasionally it won't type an "h" or backspace because the connector for the keyboard is loose. The fix for now is to squeeze the center of the laptop from the top and the bottom to reseat the connector.

My Nikon FE2 lasted me more than 20 years before I sold it and is presumeably working just as well for its new owner. My 3 year old digital takes great pictures, but it had some problems from day one and after I used it during hay bucking season I had to dissassemble and reassemble it. I'm sure it's not long for this world. A shocking lesson in the disposable nature of technology. A better camera will cost less to buy new than fixing this one.

And so it goes. Entropy 7, Marc 0.

The only upside is that not having to use a laptop as an Internet gateway means that I can use it to serve up music from my ripped CD-collection. Thus I am listening to music for the first time in 9 months.