Contemporary essays, fiction, and opinion offered regularly by author Anne Brandt.






Question for the week
How might I punctuate the following sentence? Students, stop cutting in line(?)stop throwing food(?)and stop leaving trash.
Ten minutes to
write.
Less time to
read.
Gremlins
Posted: 01/30/08
This has been a challenging couple weeks in terms of my web site, our home’s security system, our sump pumps, and snow. The old adage about when it rains it pours can be more succinctly put as: “When one thing goes wrong, there’s a snowball effect.”

My web site was the victim of hackers a couple weeks, so while the presidential candidates were slugging it out, I was out of the loop. Then the siren in our house went off and the central office for our security system called regularly to say there was a problem. Believe me, we knew there was a problem. While the technician who came believed it was because the security system and the water softener were on the same circuit, the truth was that the security system was tripped because our sump pump went out. Don’t ask me how this all relates; I’m only repeating what I was told.

Then twelve inches of snow appeared overnight, making me wonder if it was a good idea to leave for Florida for a long weekend. I mean if gremlins are going to make your life difficult, shouldn’t you stay to deal with them?

However, Earl was determined to get to the airport and out of Dodge City as fast as possible. Of all the things that went wrong, he probably hates the snow most. So last weekend we flew to Ft. Myers, Florida for a few days in spite of the homeland gremlins.

And the truth is that my web site is now up and running hacker free, the security system no longer screams at us, and we have gone and returned from our mini-vacation. The snow, however, is still with us. So it’s Earl and Anne 3, gremlins 1.


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