That week after my iPod thing died

Last Saturday, my commute to the Draper Temple become much less relaxing when (1) I left late, (2) I hit major construction, and (3) my iPod FM radio transmitter (hereafter referred to as iPod thing) broke. I made it to my session—barely—but on the way home I was forced to (1) take the roundabout way home (still hitting some construction along the way) and (2) listen to the radio.

For a few hours, I seriously considered buying a new car with an iPod dock rather than replacing my iPod thing again. That's how important it is to me to always have complete control over the listening experience in my car.

Normally I grumble when I have to go with the more expensive option, but in this case I was actually annoyed that I had to spend $30 instead of $15,000.

I still had to do without it for about a week while I waited for the product to ship, so I had to dust off my radio surfing skills, an art form I was glad to let die. I haven't listened to the radio on purpose for several years, and let me tell you—it hasn't changed one bit.

• The FM 100 (point 3) guy still pronounces Celine Dion's name wrong (like DEE-on). It bugs me so much I kind of want to bomb his house.
• I have even less tolerance for commercials than I did before.
• Soft Sunday Sounds is such a poor substitute for my Sunday playlist. They only pick artists with breathy, bored-sounding voices, and playing something interesting—like a Lord of the Rings soundtrack—is inconceivable for them.
• And my three presets that still exist are still playing all the same songs. Ones that annoy me (White Flag). Ones that stations were contractually obligated to play every fifth song and that I violently hated (like that Tim McGraw song by Taylor Swift—with the exception of one song, I still can't listen to any of her stuff). And the ones I would voluntarily listen to, but that can be more fun to experience when you have no control over when they're played (Keith Urban is apparently still a big deal).

But the inability to skip songs and avoid commercials was too much for me. So I figured it was the perfect time to try out that list of new podcasts I've been collecting and listen to them on my commute (with headphones. Well, headphones in one ear, anyway). And of course I like most of them, and I'm probably going to have to start splitting my work commute between music and podcast listening now.

Because sitting in silence while I'm driving isn't an option (unless I'm really, really mad).

It's been interesting to try to get by without my normal driving routine, but I am plenty happy to return to what's comfortable and familiar.

But when iPod thing #4 breaks, I think I'll spring for that new car.

A geyser in my closet

It was 10:35 p.m. I had a few pages of my chapter left, and then I was going to call it good for the night and go to bed.

Then I heard a roar.

At first I thought it was just my heater being extra loud, but then I got up to investigate. The sound was definitely coming from the utility closet. I pressed my ear against the door and was startled to feel a spray of water. I turned the hall light on, opened the door, and BAM.

Geyser in the closet.

I located the source of the geyser right away—a disconnected washer tube. After searching frantically for a lever, switch, or button to make the water stop, I did what I always do in a crisis: call my parents. (Yes, it did occur to me to call the maintenance emergency number, but the last time I tried that the number was disconnected.) The main benefit I got from this phone call was someone to panic with me (not an entirely useless thing to have). Nothing I did was helping, and I was getting wetter and wetter (that water was cold), so I made another desperate phone call to my apartment's general office number, hoping an updated after-hours number would be on the answering machine.

It was. Maintenance Emergency Guy answered the phone almost immediately, and told me where the lever was to turn the water off. Of course, I couldn't find it because it was dark and I didn't have my glasses on and I was already panicked about the lake in my hallway—what if I pulled the wrong lever and blew up my whole apartment?

Maintenance Emergency Guy said he'd be right over, and I used that time to finish getting dressed and find my glasses. And I found that magic lever about 30 seconds before he showed up.

That silence after 10 minutes of roaring was the most beautiful sound.

Then came the aftermath.

Really nice Maintenance Emergency Guy found the lever that turned off the washer so we could turn the water back on, meaning I would in fact get to shower the next morning. He also called somebody to come vacuum up the lake.

I changed into dry clothes, and started mopping up what I could with every towel I could spare.

These pictures really don't do this adventure justice, but I had to do something to satiate my nerves while I waited for Vacuum Guy.

A swimming pool also formed in my washing machine.

The items on my fridge got the worst of the damage. My coupon calendar, sadly, wasn't salvageable.

In hindsight, I wish I had snapped a quick photo of the geyser in the closet, but I was more concerned with other things at the time, like keeping my hair dry.

Vacuum Guy arrived 20 minutes later, so I moved my sodden mass of towels from the wet tile in front of the door to my bathtub.

And I finally found a use for that extra shower curtain I bought four years ago.

While I was ringing and hanging, this nifty little machine was sucking up water.

And when his job was done, Vacuum Guy put this very loud fan next to my bedroom door and told me to leave it on nonstop for two days.

Vacuum Guy left at midnight, and the worst of my crisis was over.

So I celebrated with a midnight comfort-food snack.

I was tired enough to forget that there was no way my body was going to allow sleep after such a disruption to my life of calm, so I spent the night tossing and turning when I could have been doing something fun, like finishing my book. Oddly enough, it wasn't the loud fan or replays of freezing water shooting at me while I tried not to drop my phone that kept my mind whirring. It was all the what-could-have-beens. What if I had been asleep when that tube broke? What if I hadn't been able to get ahold of someone to save the day? What if another pipe broke and I couldn't hear its resulting roar because the fan was so loud?

This whole experience could have been much, much worse. When your only casualty is your coupon calendar, you count yourself very fortunate indeed. (Plus it's great that I haven't made the plunge to home ownership yet, so the apartment managers get the fun task of footing the bill for repairs.)

This isn't something I ever wanted to experience, especially without another adult around to help, but a part of me is grateful it happened. This was one of those crises every adult has to face at some point, and you never know how you'll handle it until it happens. But I made those critical calls, kept my head, and pulled through it with some dignity in tact. It's one more thing I've proved to myself I can handle on my own, and I've got some battle-earned tips to keep in mind for the next crisis.

• You need to own more than four towels, even if you're the only one who uses them.
• The minute you move into a new home, locate as many buttons, switches, and levers as you can—you never know when you'll need them.
• When you get a new phone, take an hour to learn how to use it so you don't waste time figuring out how to dial a number in the middle of an emergency.

I will be considerably less glass-is-half-full about this if I have another sleepless night, though.

So long, dinosaur

When I got a new phone at the start of my junior year of college, I was excited it had a camera. I have no idea what the elite phones were like in 2008, but at the time I still thought it was a novelty to have a phone with not just call and text capabilities, but that took pictures. Even though the pictures were stuck in the phone forever.

(And there are some great pictures in there: BYU campus at varying stages of weather and daylight, funny signs, Mom sitting on Kimberly while Dad tries to watch ESPN, Tyrel in a SARS mask, an extremely blurry capture of me and Kimberly at the dollar movies after we finished finals (I think we saw He's Just Not That Into You, which ruined any chance I had of ever thinking Bradley Cooper was attractive), me wearing a Relief Society service crown I unintentionally kept for weeks, a selfie of me "sleeping" at work, a close-up of my eye, and documentation of the last Jazz game I went to.)

As cellphone technology outstripped me, my phone got more and more useless. It couldn't send or receive pictures. Group texts didn't always make it. It used T9, not autocorrect. It had no GPS to get me out of helpless wanderings. Emoticons showed up as boring boxes. I couldn't check emails or consult Google. I rarely saw more than three bars for reception. And I never did figure out how to change the embarrassing voicemail greeting I recorded in high school.

Sure, I could still call people—which is the whole point of cellphones in the first place, in case you forgot—but as the world got more used to carrying computers around in their pockets, it got harder to keep up as a dumbphone user. I rather like being disconnected for hours at a time, thank you very much, but you'd be surprised by how often other people are annoyed, offended, and/or inconvenienced by my phone's lack of abilities.

I held on to that phone far longer than was practical. What can I say? I saw nothing wrong with being the last millennial dumbphone user. It made it much easier to not think about work on vacations. I enjoyed the "What the heck is that?" looks people gave me when I pulled out my flip phone that was actually small enough to fit in my tiny pockets.

"So you have an iPhone 6, do you?" I say. "Well, I've been using the same phone for six and a half years."

I think you already know which feat I think is more impressive.

And just like I did with my first car, I was fond of my phone's faults. Everyone else's phones were smug and hoity-toity—my phone was quirky and charming.

But about a month ago, those faults ceased to be cute. In a matter of days, the battery went from lasting almost a week to losing a third of its power every time I sent a lousy text. For four days it re-sent bits and pieces of the group texts I got last Tuesday, telling me several times a day that Kimberly was moments from giving birth, followed up by a stranger's reply-all congratulations text. (Which had five grammatical errors in it, by the way. After receiving the message 23 times, I think I'm justified in resenting that person for several more months.) And it chose now to get its revenge for all the times I dropped it—the back won't attach snugly anymore.

TO HECK WITH IT ALL—I'M JOINING THE 21ST CENTURY.

My iPhone 5 arrived in the mail today.

As a last show of respect for the phone that worked well enough for over six years, the first thing I did after I activated my phone was take a picture (in HD!) to immortalize its existence.

So long, dinosaur. I might have been a little more sad about this parting if you weren't so irritating at the end.

That time my car was a fridge

Sunday night, after putting enchiladas in the oven, starting my dishwasher, and wiping down the kitchen (a rather satisfying succession of actions), I opened my fridge to put the cheese away. When the light didn't pop on, I groaned.

I know better than to assume that when your fridge light isn't working, it's because the light bulb is out. (Learned that one the hard way.) Usually it's something more ominous, like no power in critical power outlets. Like, say, the power outlet that keeps your perishables from perishing.

The frustrating thing was, I knew there was a simple fix to the problem. They told me so the last time this happened, but they left out a crucial piece of information: where to locate the magic switch that would make my fridge hum again.

Major communication fail.

Since nothing electrical in my apartment is located in the obvious place (I still have a hard time finding the light switch in the dark, even though I've lived here for over two years), I couldn't find the magic button on my own. All I got from my fiddling was flashing clocks that needed to be reset.

I started to resign myself to another fridge's worth of food gone to waste, when my dad pointed out the obvious: it's cold outside. The entire state is basically encased in a giant freezer.

So I hauled my food out to my car. My only worry was that my food would overfreeze, actually, since the low that night was 15 degrees. My solution was to put a blanket over my enchiladas and a few other fridge items. (Laugh all you want, but it worked.)

With my food stored outside, I envisioned living like a pioneer for the next 15 hours, running outside to the "icebox" in my coat and slippers when I needed milk for my cereal. Funny how we modern wimps put ourselves on the same level as the pioneers when one appliance fails.

The next day I worked from home. I didn't want anyone pushing any magic buttons without my being there to witness it this time.

All in all, what could have been a much more annoying problem ended up being a little adventure that forced me to use my dormant primitive creative powers and gave me an excuse to work from home bundled up in comfy clothes and blankets. Not a bad situation to find yourself in.

The first appliance I ever bought

As a college freshman living at home, a half hour away from the big city, I often wondered what it would be like when I moved out. A part of me still couldn't believe that my classmates griped about roommates and grocery shopping instead of parents and siblings, and my stomach flip-flopped every time I thought about the day that I would complain about grown-up stuff like the cost of milk.

I imagined thousands of scenarios: roommates who would become my adopted sisters, BYU's giant pool of returned missionaries who were suddenly contenders for my own Eternal Prince Charming™, late-night adventures with study groups and grocery shopping mates, cleaning checks done by someone other than my mom, classes with students from exotic places like Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Maybe I would cross paths with one of those football players I saw on TV (though I wouldn't know it if I did), or I would be on a first-name basis with someone who helped compile the 1985 LDS Hymnbook.

I imaged horrifying scenarios as well: roommates who would steal my shampoo and leave the light on all night, living quarters the size of my parents' kitchen and living room, college-level science classes and teachers who don't know their students' names, homesickness that would hit at the worst times, like when I'm at a party full of people who all know how to socialize better than I do.

I wanted it all. I wanted to start with nothing—no friends, no dishes, no furniture—and build a new life to stack on top of the foundation my parents had already built for me.

When I moved into Miller 6 on that August day, I took in everything (though I tried not to breathe in too much—visits to other college apartments had warned me that apartments don't always smell nice) from the stained, shaggy blue carpet to whitewashed walls. It wasn't exactly the grand welcome I had envisioned in my highest-rated fantasies, but it was my new life, nonetheless.

It took me a few days to notice that we didn't have a toaster. Me and the five other girls living there had all assumed a toaster would come with the apartment, bolted into place like the fridge and microwave.

It was my first crisis as an adult. How would I have my after-school snack (toast) without a toaster? How would I make tomato sandwiches with the tomatoes from my grandpa's garden?

I took it upon myself to furnish our apartment with a toaster. To my great surprise and delight, I found one at Walmart for just five dollars. A white, dinky little toaster.

When it perfectly toasted its first slice of bread, I spread the good news to my family and roommates and wrote about it in my journal. I had bought my first appliance, one that made a simple delicacy like toast a part of my new adult life.

I used that toaster for years. It switched owners a couple of times, got a little tired as the years passed, but it was still my toaster, the talisman of my adult life.

Today, I bought a new toaster. I needed one with longer slots to accommodate the fancy bread I make with my bread maker. I almost grabbed a toaster very similar to my dinky toaster model, but then I saw the shiny silver toasters that had settings for "bagels" and "frozen." I forgot about the single-digit-priced toaster and got this thirty-dollar one instead.

This newer, shinier model means that I don't have to cut off sections of huge bread before toasting it. It has features I didn't think I needed until I found out they existed. I won't have to push the toast down twice anymore, which will deprive me of daily thoughts of one of my favorite Hugh Jackman movies.

I still try to stick to my buy-no-article-of-clothing-over-twenty-dollars rule, I still use a dumb phone, and the promise of free food still affects my meal schedule days in advance. But the good-enough-for-now mentality I had in college has been replaced with the this-is-cooler-and-you-can-have-it mentality I slowly adopted after replacing my hourly student wage with a salary and benefits. My life comprises more than just the simple necessities of life now.

It's a good place to be in, but I'm sure going to miss that little toaster.

Frozen

• -8 degrees this morning.
• Venture outside at 6:50 a.m. to move my car from behind Dad's so he can go to work.
• Go outside again at 7:10 a.m. to move my car from behind Mom's car so she can go to work. Car won't start.
• Try again at 7:25 a.m. This time, the car starts.
• Properly bundled up this time, go outside yet again to head to my 8:00 a.m. dentist appointment. Car won't start.
• Attempt to "borrow" brother's car. His is stuck/frozen in the snow. Won't budge.
• Try to start my car again, but only succeed in hurting my fingers.
• Storm inside and call dental clinic to cancel my appointment that I specifically set up knowing that I would be in town today.
• All that worry about going to the dentist for the first time in two years, wasted.
• I hate going to the dentist, anyway.
• But really, this bitter cold is getting ridiculous. I'm so over it.

Rain storms and power outages

We've had some pretty awesome rainstorms during the past few days. In the Carter household, any form of weather is cause for giddyness, video cameras, and excitement. And yesterday was probably the most intense weather day we've had in awhile, because not only did Mother Nature rage all around us, the power went out. For an hour.

A really long hour.

When the lights first went out, we were sitting in the living room, enjoying the sound of the rain. Then without warning, the lights died and the fridge stopped humming. We all just kind of grinned at each other and then dashed to the window and stared outside like a bunch of dogs (that's Tyrel's wording, not mine). Soon we couldn't resist the temptation any longer and we all ran outside, some of us standing out in the rain, some of us standing in the protection of the garage.

Eventually the novelty of the storm wore off, and one by one we trudged back inside. Soon the rain stopped, and we found ourselves in an unusually quiet house. No buzzing computer, no monstrously loud fridge, no more rain drops. The silence was eerie.

That's when the uneasiness started. Power outages are all fun and games for a few minutes, but anything long term is cause for panic. Your life changes completely when you can't open the fridge for a cold glass or milk or heat up a burrito in the microwave, when you can't turn on the computer or the t.v. for a few hours of entertainment, or when you can't rely on your central air system to keep your house at the temperature you want. I started to think that I would starve because we had no way of cooking or preserving food, and if I didn't starve first, I probably would have died of boredom because I didn't have the option of watching a rainy-day movie, which must mean that there is nothing else to do.

Never mind the fact that I still had the convenience of cell phones, batteries, cars, and running water—not to mention my under-used imagination—but without electricity, I was pretty much hopeless.

I'm not saying that our family is woefully unprepared for any sort of crisis—we have our food supply, we have quite a camping stash, we have relatives, and we have our brains—but all of that seemed moot without the conveniences of electricity. Suddenly, it seemed the only thing I could do was take a nap and wait for the power to come back on.

I never thought that going an hour without power would be such a crisis. I tend to shy away from technological gadgets, but it's clear that I can't steer clear of technology completely. Electricity is almost as much a part of me as my beliefs are.

How sad.

There is no such thing as a car without problems

This morning I got up on time—7:18. I successfully resisted the urge to destroy my alarm clock. I was about to get in the shower when I realized that we were out of conditioner. So I went downstairs to our storage room and found a new bottle. I then proceeded to take a shower. Then I did my hair and stuff and found an outfit that I rather liked. I brushed my teeth pain-free for the first time in a week or so because all of the sores in my mouth are finally gone. I didn't pack a lunch today because we didn't have any bread, so I was ready to leave for work a full 5 minutes early. I got in my car, excited for the half-hour drive of listening to my favorite music. I put my key in the ignition and turned it—and nothing happened. For the third time in the last week, my car wouldn't start, and this time I didn't have another family car to recharge the battery.

For one so young, I have had a lot of car problems in my day. I bought my first car when I was 16 and I have had one ever since. (Note that I said that I, not someone else, bought my first car. And I still had to go my entire sophomore year of high school without a car, even though I got my license in September or October. I really hate it when parents buy their kids cars for their 16th birthday because no 16-year-old deserves that big of a gift. Just thought I would make it clear that I got my first car because I actually worked for it.)

My first car was a 1997 Volkswagon Golf. I loved that car. It was my favorite shade of green, it was small, and it was a stick-shift. I wasn't too excited about the stick-shift part when I first bought it, but I soon discovered that manually shifting greatly contributes to the speed and power of the car. And besides, if I ever have to drive a dying person to the hospital or something and the only car available is a stick, I won't have to worry about someone's obituary stating that a beloved person died because an incompetent driver wasn't able to drive their car. Plus, shifting builds character.

And boy, my car had a personality. I thought about naming it Mad-Eye Moody a couple of times. I had pretty much decided that it was a boy because it didn't work as well when it was hungry. That sounds a lot like me, actually . . . Most of my car problems didn't arise until I started delivering pizza, putting hundreds of miles on my car every week. That was when I started making a lot of visits to Payson Auto. And I don't think Bry was too thrilled to have me as a regular customer, because my car was INSANE.

For example, the speedometer was one of the first things to wig out on me. After a year or so, I had mastered the inner workings of my speedometer. It worked perfectly fine during the summer, but not at all during the winter. During the spring and the fall it worked some of the time, but the longer I drove the car the less that it worked. I got pretty good at judging my speed by reading the RPM meter and adjusting the gear I was in, so it wasn't that big of a deal. It was frustrating at times, however. One time while I was taking a delivery to a house by the high school, my speedometer died and the check engine light popped on. I was already having a bad night, so being in the bad mood that I was, I punched my steering wheel as hard as I could. And the speedometer started working again. I was so surprised that I hardly noticed the throbbing in my hand. Thus began a loving but abusive relationship with my car. My hand would get bruised from all that punching because a petty little slap wouldn't do the trick. Many times I would be chatting happily away to the person in the passenger seat and then randomly hit my steering wheel with all the force I could muster, not even noticing the shocked and slightly scared face looking at me while I continued to talk as if nothing had happened. Good times.

But the speedometer problem was NOTHING compared to the stupid alarm problem. Whenever I blew a fuse, which happened fairly often because I had to plug my cartop in, everything electrical in my car would freak out. The lights would stop working, the sun roof wouldn't open, the trunk light would pop on, the gages would go haywire, the clock would reset every time I started the car, and the radio wouldn't work. But the worse part of the deal was that the doors wouldn't lock. You could hear the locks whirring, trying to lock, but they would just be stuck in that whirring zone. That whirring noise was a very bad noise because it meant that a worse noise was about to explode from the car. If I tried to unlock the door or start my car, the deafening alarm would go off. I'm pretty sure people in Mexico were writhing in pain on the ground with their fingers stuffed in their ears whenever my blasted alarm went off. The only way to turn it off was to fiddle with the trunk lock. But only after you alerted the entire neighborhood that your car was pulling a tantrum.

For a long time the radio wouldn't work. Then one day it just decided to start working. That was an exciting day. But the radio was still subject to the whims of my car's personality. So as an early graduation present, my parents installed a new radio/cd player into my car while I was on choir tour. I got back to the high school exhausted, but excited to try out my new radio—but my dad made the mistake of locking my car. It was my car that so rudely announced to the school that the choir kids were back from choir tour.

It took my car a long time to warm up to people. It strongly disliked Kimberly and my mom, but it didn't have a problem with my dad. After awhile it started being a good boy for Kimberly, but that was only after she was a regular passenger for at least a year.

Sometimes smoke would come out of the air conditioning vents. Actually, it was probably more like steam. My car never overheated, so to this day I am still baffled as to why steam would come out of the vents. And sometimes smoke came out of the steering wheel, too. Weird.

The wiper fluid tube thing for my back window was aimed backward so that rather than squirting my window with fluid, it would squirt the road behind me. I used this when big mean trucks were shining their big mean headlights into all of my mirrors. Or when I was racing people home. It may have been a wimpy weapon, but it was a weapon nonetheless—not many cars can eject fluid when you actually tell it to.

Then there was the time that my car tried to accelerate on its own. I was delivering pizza during the first snowstorm of the season, which is always a fun experience. I was waiting at a stop sign when it suddenly sounded like someone was revving the gas over and over again and I felt like if I let my foot off the brake as least a little, the car would take off again, regardless if the clutch was in or not. Officially freaked out, I slowly got going again and the car shot back into motion—not a good thing when the roads are covered in snow. My car continued to make the revving noises whenever I was in neutral or at a standstill. That night after I was finally able to go home, I decided to try a little experiment. I stopped at the stop sign right by my house (which in and of itself is unusual), shifted into first gear, and then let go of the gas. In 10 seconds my car went from 0 to 15 without any help from me—and we were going uphill. That was fun to explain to Bry.

Then there were all of the normal wear-and-tear issues—bald tires, blown-out CV joints, dying starters and mufflers. On Saint Patrick's Day my sophomore year of college, after picking my car up from the shop that it had never been to before, my car pulled a major fit, introducing a few new problems that manifested themselves to no one but me. Angry that I was not going to be able to make it to work and fed up with my retarded car, I decided then and there that I had had it—it was time to sell it. It took several months, but finally that car was out of my hands.

My new car, a 2003 Hyundai Elantra, was a blessed change at first. I actually missed the lack of personality. There was nothing weird or quirky about it. I thought that I had finally found a normal car. Wrong again.

While this car hasn't been nearly as insane as my last one, it has gone through some expensive repairs. It overheated while I was going to the dentist one day, and that ended up being a $2000 repair. This lovely experience came during a time when I had 4 dollars in the bank. I recently had to buy 2 new CV joints and get the oil leak fixed.

And then the dreaded time came—time to register my car. I rarely pass the first time, so I wasn't looking forward to it. However, for once, fortune was sent my way. This year I only had to get the emissions done. They spent all of 15 minutes on it and then they were done. All I had to do was hand over 23 bucks and they gave me my certificate. Then I registered my car online and within a few days I had new stickers for my car. It was awesome. But alas, it wasn't meant to be

So now I am sitting here at home, waiting for someone to send me some work so that I can get something productive done today. Talk about a good hair day wasted.