Saturday Blues

Saturday was a very bad day for me.

First I went to grind some grain to get flour to make bread. My Nutrimill I had last used a few days before –just fine. This day I connected it and filled it and turned it on “as usual” and all that happened was a soft “click” when I turned it on, not the motor starting, but just a click and nothing more. Plugged in or not, same thing.

According to the manual there is nothing about it (really, the manual mentions NOTHING.) Online sites selling the Nutrimill state its “automatic reset” is wonderful, basically. I say pooh to it.

When the canister is removed you can see the “fuse” area, a black rectangle like thing with the red 12 “button” in the middle. On mine I do not know what it felt like when my machine worked, but this day it was “loose” like.

In any case it’s that when the machine is ‘turned on’ whether plugged in or not, the ‘click’ sound emminates from the area of the machine right above the ‘fuse’ I described.

What’s going on with it, I have no clue. I leave this sort of customer service thing to my DH. Unfortunately, this happened on a Saturday, the Saturday of a Holiday Weekend (Labor Day in the USA.) We were going out of town on Monday, and wouldn’t be home until Wednesday night, so there was nothing that we could do until today, really. I don’t know that DH has done anything yet either.

That whole affair on Saturday really upset me. I was looking for info with my DH online on his computer, and I got frustrated and went into the kitchen and put on music to play on my laptop, and then a bit later started to search google for more Nutrimill info, but my keyboard wasn’t acting right. It was odd, and in the back of my head I thought “liquid” but didn’t bring that info to the forefront. I continued trying to get some words typed out and finally just “restarted” the computer, and that didn’t help the situation. I stupidly tried another restart right away and the computer screamed at me intensely (as if when the motherboard posted there were keys stuck on or something … ) So I turned it off and cried a bit, then picked it up and screamed my head off … there was liquid coming out of it, a pool of something on the butcher block island I had my laptop on.

What had gone on previously was that our cat Dixie was trying to curl up on it and sleep when she could, that day. It was something new for her, doing this to my computer, but she was a known keyboard sleeper from the past in certain situations. The only difference for my laptop was that I used to have the butcher block island in the ‘dining room’ area, and had moved it to the kitchen by the window just the day or so before.

I knocked her off my laptop a few times, and DH also did, and we both yelled at her at times, and I think she retaliated.

Yes, it was pee on my laptop.

I always leave my laptop open during the day when I’m puttering around, I often have music playing, and it’s just plainly a kiosk for me to stop at here and there to check something out.

I’ve lost laptops before because of liquid, always someone else doing something, but THIS time it was different, a cat peeing on my laptop. Ugh. UGH!!!! Fortunately we got the laptop full coverage through Best Buy when we got it this year. We learned fully well the past few years that when it comes to my laptop, children seem keen on pouring things on it every so often, though they KNOW they aren’t supposed to. We thought they’d learn finally, being older now, and there wouldn’t be any issues.

Seriously, we’ve had cats pee on things before, but NEVER a computer piece. In this case, it must be retribution for being knocked off several times and yelled at.

Saturday turned into a horror for me then, two main things going “kerplunk” on me without me having done anything wrong with them personally. I got the hard drive out of the laptop right away then, and got my data off, then put it back in and off to Best Buy we trotted. Same scenario as the Nutrimill though, it was Saturday, a Holiday Weekend (Labor Day) and though we had it in to the Geek Squad right away, it wouldn’t be going anywhere or getting anything done for it until the middle of the next week at most, and as well the date they gave us as the trouble ticket said ‘Sept 15’ or something close to that, and DH said the guy said, “and a week beyond that is how things are running with HP” … so it’ll be a September of blahdom for me.

I cried and cried and cried that day. I slept pitifully and cried on Sunday. I woke up Monday numb and cold about it. We left to go to Charleston, SC that day. I missed it terribly and kept thinking it must be at home, but it wasn’t. Getting home last night was empty.

I have the Desktop to work on, but it’s relegated to a corner in the basement. It’s not a Kiosk for me. It’s not my sweet mobile HP.

This comes at a time when I was trying to sort through things and get the Desktop organized and data saved elsewhere so that I could Clean Install Win XP and get new partitioning going. Now I’m missing my laptop and can’t effect this change without it. I need the space and the working laptop for another computer if problems crop up in the install.

I’m working with an old disc, 40 gigs is all it holds. So I have to reorganize it all to make it work better. This Desktop runs well, but it has little space and I am trying to get it squared away to run better, be a happier machine to work on. I have music to rip from LP’s and I need space.

I could use a huge hard drive, but haven’t managage to alocate one to the system ($)

Thus here I am on a cramped hard drive running my laptop data off of an external 30 gig laptop drive, and trying to moosh down the data on the Desktop so that I only have what I need, and can arrange it all so that I can put it elsewhere temporarily, and then get Win XP installed again, and I can do do most of it without my laptop back, but not the full tilt version of everything.

Questions remain though, when will I get something back and what will it be?

This is about the laptop, and a similar query about the Nutrimill exists. What caused the Nutrimill to not work, and Can they/Will they fix it under warranty. When will we get answers. Eventually will I send it back and what will they do, what will I get back?

Functionality for me has been swiped down to rags. No music in the kitchen (except for earphones, which isn’t my style to work with, I like full sound in the open) and I can’t grind grain AGAIN. I can’t believe my new mill went. My Whisper Mill burnt up and we lost it due to company changes, they “stole” it, in other words, accepted delivery and never contacted us and never could we get in contact with them. That aside, besides the mill dying, it’s frustrating that I waited long to replace the mill, and finally did, and not too long later, it to quits working, and the manual says nothing about “reset” being automatic or any sort of true troubleshooting. Augh ….! I say. It’s not fun, and I’m really sad about it all.