It's always something

The Childrens' compooter died today. I don't know why. When I turn it on, it beeps once, but then nothing. The video doesn't even come on to give the BIOS splash screen, nor does the hard drive light flicker at all. I do note that the CPU fan is running really, really fast during this death. Either Carl, Jr. will tell me something simple to do that will fix it, or I'm gonna have to buy The Childrens a new compooter. This one cost $350 four years ago, so I'm not going to cry so much over the expense. It's just that I hate having to set up everyone's account just the way it used to be.

I fixed something today that had been broken since we moved in - the light in the first floor bathroom. Well, the light itself worked. It just hung on the mirror at an odd angle, with the left end quite a bit lower than the right. This turned out to be a case of somebody hanging the light by driving a regular old screw into drywall without an anchor, which was trivial to fix. The really odd thing here is that the right side of the light was held in place with a molly bolt, but the left was just a screw (a sheet metal screw at that) into drywall that had naturally pulled out. So someone took the time to do half the light right. That's bizarre.

Now, the second odd thing was that I could see half of a plastic anchor poking out from behind the mirror at the bottom of the hole in it. Meaning either someone put the anchor in the wall too low, or the mirror people bored the hole through the mirror too high. I'm reconstructing the crime scene thusly: some enterprising fellow roughed out the wiring for the fixture and then put in the drywall anchors, then the mirror was delivered and the anchors didn't line up with the holes, whoever actually put up the light fixture after the mirror install didn't have any more anchors (or was too lazy to get them), so he just screwed it into the drywall. Then, the right side came loose sometime later, and the previous owner of the house fixed just that side because if there's one thing we could count on from the previous owners, it was that they never actually fixed anything right. Then the left side came loose, but they sold us the house before fixing it.

The really sad thing is that the holes are about 1/4 bubble off level, so upon putting in the anchor and attaching the fixture to it, I found I could not level it. The Mrs. immediately pointed that out, because she's the supportive type. I'll have to get back in there to cut a slot in the drywall for the molly bolt to slide down. I thought there should be enough play in the molly bolt given the large hole already there, but there was not. Then I decided no one would notice (forgetting, of course, the hyper-critical eye of The Mrs. because in the happy place in my mind, she's a very charming, non-hyper-critical person).

I also fixed the fence gate so it doesn't drag on the ground anymore. I'm sure I'll hear that something is wrong with that soon enough.