I get it, things break, disconnect. But they can be fixed.

Sometimes it’s a matter of saying the right words to the right person at the right time.

It started with the new storm door.

It featured a self-storing screen that slipped behind the glass window, which was useful and neat.

Until the bottom part of the screen detached from the door frame.

Well, they sent me a new screen.

The bigger sign that things were sliding out of control was the electric lawnmower.

At nine years old, it had nearly doubled its planned obsolesce, but when it took me two days to mow the postage-stamp sized lawn because the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, it was clear the end had come. That and the fact they had stopped making that model and battery some years ago.

I like electric lawnmowers. They mean I can mow the lawn without ear plugs. I’m on my third, the first two lasting nearly 20 years between them.

I get it, things break, disconnect.

But they can be fixed.

A battery can be replaced, a screen reconnected.

Sometimes it’s a matter of saying the right words to the right person at the right time.

Then, just for fun, it was the doorbell, the wireless wonder.

Left our neighbor’s son on the porch holding a bag of tomatoes he had grown, pushing the button and wondering why no one answered the door.

It was a fun device. You had a choice of  rings from Beethoven’s Fifth, to Christmas carols to Yankee Doodle. But there was decided Confederate undertone with the added choices of Dixie and a couple other Southern battle hymns.

Anyway, it quit, 20 years in.

Now, ya’d think that only so many things can break in one house in the same week.

But you’d be wrong.

On Saturday, my desktop computer stopped computing.

There I was typing away when the keyboard quit.

Right there in the middle of some word I was misspelling, it decided it had had enough.

Usually with computer peripherals, a quick reboot connects the devices.

But with a keyboard, you need a keyboard to reconnect the computer to the keyboard.

So I found the virtual keyboard and rebooted, and then consulted both the instructions from the computer manufacturer and the software  maker for a possible fix, and each said the keyboard was fine.

Of course they did.

So I played their little game of do this or that and reboot until all is well until on the last reboot, the computer just stopped and I’ve been staring at a blank screen all day.

Not all is lost. Computer software is a  bunch of ones and zeros and I’m guessing this time the ones went out to lunch and forget to tell the zeros.

The computer can be restarted and the files saved, but, and this is the part that is fun, you need a keyboard and an escape key to do it. One with a cord and plug, you know, old tech.

Meanwhile the last pages of the fifth Frank Nagler Mystery are wondering where I am – I left Frank rifling through the dead mayor’s office looking for clues to his death. Maybe when I get back he’ll have found them.

Stuff breaks.

We get careless, thoughtless, selfish, unforgiving. We damage things we don’t mean to break, and all the rips and tears are like the files locked in a computer, words a lover never hears.

It takes a different software to fix that.

Just need a restore point.