A Stressful Week

Last Tuesday, around lunchtime, the power suddenly cut out to all but the kitchen appliances. Cue panicked calls to the National Grid’s emergency line, then to our energy provider.

An engineer turned up from our energy provider, but was of little help, suggesting we call an emergency electrician to find where the fault was. We had power coming into the house, but something was causing the circuit breaker to trip.

The electrician was of somewhat more assistance, isolating the fault to the lighting circuit, but wasn’t able to find the fault in the two hours he spent checking everything around the house.

However, around the same time, we spotted water leaking through from the attic, and surmised that it may be the cause of our woes.

The plumber turned up the following morning and found the source of the leak, an old stopcock that had corroded.

A lot of unwanted expense, plus we had to postpone the return of the window installers to finish off their work around the new double-glazing.

Then on Friday my mother’s old iMac started hanging again, and wouldn’t restart. I’d managed to force it to Recovery Mode after several goes the last time this happened, and had hoped that reinstalling macOS Mojave would sort it out, but my hopes have been dashed.

As the computer is eight years old, I decided the best option would be to get mum a new iMac and transfer her data to it from the external Time Machine backup. Confirming that there was one we could pay for and collect on the following Saturday turned into a lengthy phone call to Apple, which didn’t help my stress level.

And as it is the weekend, traffic into town was horrible, the first car park we tried was full, we had to hunt for a parking bay in the next one along, and I had to contend with a noisy crowded shopping centre.

Setting up the new iMac was a breeze, thankfully. But the following morning, when I got around to connecting her printer, it spat out a test page with no black ink on it. Argh!

As I’m typing this, the window installers are filling in around the new windows. Fingers crossed, I can move my computer and desk back into my room by the end of this week and return to a semblance of normality. And I sincerely hope that the lighting circuit will work now, and won’t require more troubleshooting.