Of Golbins and Elves, enjoying themselves

Tonight, we battled mightily with our household demons.

It began last night with an ominous hiss and then a foul vapour, issuing from the vicinity of T's just-rebooted computer. That first salvo successful --- we have only one functioning desktop in the apartment tonight --- the second assault proved to be a sly, secretive intrusion tonight. One minute, the printer was chugging along happily, having printed 13 sheets and working its way through the next 17. The next minute: a baffling silence. A quick internal checkup showed that one piece of paper was jammed. It took a bit more than I expected to dislodge the sheet, but all looked well. But the printer refused to re-calibrate itself. It insisted in that annoying female Star Trek Computer-wannabe voice that there was still a "paper jam".

And 'lo, squeezed tight between immovable black piece and immovable white piece, was a tidily scrunched-up sheet of previously pristine paper, leering at me. The opening into which it was squeezed was too narrow for my fingers to grasp it. I applied a pair of tweezers instead, but only succeeded in extracting minute squares of paper, rather than the entire sheet. We didn't have a Philips-head screwdriver, naturally, since we haven't been able to find T's Swiss Army knife in weeks (we really do need to clean this place up, yes). And I was ready to give in and let the computer tech who's dropping by tomorrow to take care of it, when T decided he'd be all manly and somehow get his thicker fingers into that narrow opening (really, no innuendoes here, we couldn't afford the sexy printer model so ours is distinctly utilitarian and even faintly bulbous) --- and voila! A well-accordioned sheet of paper emerged and the printer was working again.

But the worst was yet to come.

My printouts were complete, I was ready to start blogging, and the final onslaught made itself known. T hollered from the kitchen, where he'd manfully shifted our dryer out of place. Behind it: the evidence. A dripping hose, no longer plugged into the right outlet in the wall that drains water from our washing machine. Behind the machines --- and indeed, under where the dryer had sat, now that T'd moved it --- a carpet of lint, dirt and the odd leached roach. The hose could be realigned into its outlet, no problem, but I wasn't going to let T re-site the dryer without at least a passing attempt to mop up that lint (and the roach). So off I went, scrubbing on the floor for a good ten minutes and shaking lint into the trash. I didn't get all of it --- there's a corner of it where the washer leans up against a perpendicular wall that my arm's too short to reach. But I made good inroads into the mossy undergrowth and I'm happy to report that there's, really, only a square of black miscellany left in the further-most corner.

Now I'm pooped. And I didn't even get around to the articles I wanted to work on tonight.

Non sequitur of the hour: My eyebrows itch where they were "trimmed" Saturday.