When Appliances Explode

We don't have any pets to look after in our new place, just a house. The house even has a separate office so I have to commute out the laundry door and across the courtyard to get to work. The courtyard has a pool with bright blue tiles and cascades of vivid pink bougainvillea. It all looks quite tropical except for the weather which is miserably cold outside and even colder inside. My colleagues in Queensland giggle pitilessly when I turn up for Teams meetings in puffer jacket and beanie, my scarf wrapped so firmly around my face that my cold blue nose can barely be seen. I drink copious cups of tea in an effort to stay warm, which has the added effect of making me get up to check the plumbing at regular intervals.

The missing ingredient is sunshine.

 

Winter finally turned up on the last day of Autumn.  South Australia buckled under their version of a deluge: a good 10mm fell mercilessly from the sky. Tucked up in my cold office, I discovered a leak necessitating heroic actions with towels and Tupperware to prevent water getting in places where it shouldn't, like laptops and electrical equipment. I commuted across the courtyard for lunch and discovered a whole community of plastic tubs and towels where Roger had carried out his own leak management campaign. That's the thing about South Australia's buildings: in a state that never gets a heavy downpour every building springs a leak at the merest hint of a drizzle. Shopping centres become obstacle courses of 'wet floor' warning signs, festooned with the commercial equivalent of Tupperware and overrun with cleaners wielding mops. Home owners always tell us where their leaks are and when it rains we find new leaks that they forgot to mention.

Gutters overflow with disturbing alacrity.

 

Barely had we finished coping with the leaks when the microwave died with a terrible noise and a puff of smoke large enough to raise fears of house fires.  The fire contained itself to scorch marks in the microwave, which we pronounced dead at the scene. Being the resilient person that he is, Roger prepared to eat cold tinned soup or starve rather than do something so terribly old-fashioned as use the cook-top.  Happily this sacrifice wasn't necessary because in a stroke of great good fortune all our worldly goods had not long been delivered to our storage shed. A morning's rummaging yielded our microwave which had sat in storage for the past 3 years and lo and behold, the first box we opened yielded the glass microwave plate. Not only had the glass plate survived our amateurish packing but mid-rummage we found the little roller mechanism for the plate which both of us had quite forgotten we needed, and which saved us from getting home and having two microwaves one of which was dead and the other unable to rotate its plate.

I won't bore you with pictures of microwaves dead or alive.  Here instead is Milang jetty, where after rummaging we retired for thermos coffee.

What with leaks and flamed-out microwaves, I'm just waiting for a third thing to ignite/break/leak/fall over, while being thankful we don't have a pet for this house sit. The way things are going it would probably have exploded by now and that would be hard to explain via text to home owners in some exotic location on the other side of the world!

I'm going to go zap something in the microwave now, just because I can.