Mild winter. Very little ice.
Some frosty days. Cloud comes in and drops rain, and the place heats up. How
much? Not to the level of flames. It’s that time of year. The awkward time of
year. It’s time for the heating engineer to turn up a week before December.
I haul the Christmas tree boxes out of the
cupboard to let the engineer check the gas. He releases some gas. Perhaps he
does that silently, as well. The gas I hear being released hisses away as part
of the check.
Space is crucial, and I pack the Christmas
tree boxes back into the cupboard. Timing is a little off. I wait a week until
it is December, and then I haul the boxes back out for the building of the
tree.
There are a few rogue Christmas trees up in
late November. Perhaps they’ve taken control of their human subjects for
experiments…testing human capacity to absorb the damage dealt by festive meals,
for example.
But here, under this occasionally frosty
roof, it’s important that I remember when to put the tree up. That’s my raging
fist waving at dementia. Building the tree on the first of December. Using
memory to make December into December.
I discover more shiny baubles with
disintegrating elastic bands. Out comes the string, and I construct new loops
to hang over artificially snowy artificial pine needles on artificial branches.
The baubles aren’t really made of silver. Turns out, I’m not real.
The lights must connect, bottom to middle to
top. I press the switch. The connection is loose. I press it in. The lights
work. I’m concerned at the loose connection, though. Switching the transformer
off, I lift it to take a closer look. And it rattles. Right. Well. That’s done,
then. Doesn’t matter if the lights work after a fashion…
To let that slide is to turn a mild winter
into a fiery hot one. No good. I test the smoke alarms and the CO alarms every
week. And I replace the batteries when the machines chirrup and warble at me.
Hell, come year’s end those batteries are replaced anyway.
If I test these essential things, I can’t
let a faulty transformer slide. Buying a new one is almost impossible. The
model is easy enough to find on the internet. You just can’t buy it. And it’s
wasteful to buy a new tree just for the transformer.
A new transformer, very similar, is winging
its way on Santa’s sleigh while I type this trivia. Yes, it’s saddening that we
don’t have the lights on the tree. Not as saddening as dementia carer and dementia sufferer die in pointless house fire. Cause
of fire: tree lights.
If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait for
the new power source and hope it works as well as the old one did. My quest to
replace faulty electrical goods, or to buy new gadgets before the old gadgets
wear out, is an endless quest for safety.
Today I was engaged in random acts of
repair. In a sense, these are random acts of kindness. Occasionally, they are
random acts of KITKAT. The supermarket didn’t have any chunky ones last time,
and I had to make do with those four-in-a-bed
versions. No, it’s not the same.
What sort of maintenance did I find myself
caught up in? There’s a salt-sprayer, for dealing with ice. It’s a handy
gadget. Battery-operated. And that is the problem. Instead of having a switch
to hold the battery cover in place, the device has a screw securing the cover.
As the days and nights grew colder, I
thought about this annoying piece of metal. I prefer not to leave batteries
inside gadgets – except for fire alarms and remote controls. The salt-sprayer
remained resolutely battery-free.
And the path remained resolutely frost-free.
I thought of morning routine for daycare.
Sort the pills, and that’s one task out of the way. Await a carer who comes in
and assists with getting ready. There’s a short window of time for brushing the
path clear of debris and securing the garden gate.
That’s early, and that’s when I’ll see the
frosty situation. I can’t be caught up in fixing batteries into this sprayer
with a mini-screwdriver, not with loads of other things going on. With no frost
on the path today, I was caught up in fixing batteries into that sprayer with a
mini-screwdriver. Job done.
It’s cold outside, and the gadget is ready
to go at a moment’s notice. I check the sky near sunset, and predict the
morning’s weather based on that. Two frosty days in a row. Three frosty days in
a row. The sun clears rooftops and melts most of the frost.
But the frost that remains intensifies,
lying there in the shadows, and it starts to resemble snow. Luckily, it is not
snow. More luckily, the daycare bus pulls up in morning sunlight. We ignore the
fake snow on the other side of the building.
I’m ready with my salt gun of doom. Flip the
safety off, no faffing about with batteries or mini-screwdrivers, and I am
ready for hot melting action. As soon as I unclasp the salt bin’s lid and scoop
ammunition into the belly of the beast. That’s a bit of a faff.
Yes, this sounds dramatic. Hot melting
action. The actual salt setting on the machine is rather tame. Grind-grind-grind.
I have an army of brooms and shovels to tackle the iciest build-up. But there
hasn’t been a severe icy build-up in a long time.
Doesn’t matter. With daycare more than once
a week, it’s best to prepare for the icy build-up that’s coming. Winter is
about months of dodging true winter weather. And we’ve been dodging that for
years.
Some frost. A hint of snow in the sky.
Mostly…rain. From the door to the bus at the foot of the garden, we all cope
with rain. We need rain…not to put fires out. It’s far better to be on top of
the faulty gadget situation. That’s your best Christmas present to yourself.
Don’t fuck around with faulty lights. Deal with the problem. Immediately.
This handy notion applies to the faulty
kettle, the suspect plug, the dodgy toaster, the tired blender, the quirky
fridge, the mostly-reliable oven, and the Frankensteinian lightning generator
in your mad science lab.
Love that made science lab. But the dodgy
gadgets in it have to go before they burn the castle down. You can’t be doing
peasants out of a job.
I don’t type these blog
posts. Instead I type these blog posts…and I take a break from typing to do a
stint of caring. Then I’m back for more typing. Just then, I was in that room
staring at the imposing presence of an unlit tree.
Plenty of baubles, bangles, and beads on the
tree to make the jaded viewer sit up and take note. The lights aren’t on, and
they aren’t on in a dangerous way. I think much of the tree. There’s a story
attached to the purchase of it. And that is a story of replacing tired
electrical gadgets.
Imposing unlit tree, we salute you. Within
the week, the lights will return…and in safety. Unless I’ve ordered the wrong
transformer. Many people on the internet complain about the noises emitted by
transformers. I don’t object to the humming. It’s the rattling that gets to me.
Christmas message? Stay safe. Check your
electricals. Don’t neglect your gasicals. Beware rooftops packed with icicles.
There are people in this street who fix up
their flashing icicles ahead of December, and I know why they do it. They seize
on a mild day, before the ice sets in, with as much daylight late into the
afternoon as possible, and, once home from work, or on a weekend, they risk
life, limb, ladder, and the lights themselves, to affix the electrical displays
in good light and calm weather.
I wouldn’t put stuff like that on the edge
of the roof. But even if I did, I’d still be forced to wait until December.
There isn’t a law. (Yes, there is totally a law. And it comes from the same
section of the code as HALLOWE’EN decorations go on sale before Christmassy
ones. This is known. So it is
written.)
The best form of preparation
was in buying plastic Christmas boxes, two of them, to hold the three parts of
the impressive tree. Cardboard tree boxes are nothing but trouble. Carve a
place for your tree boxes in the cupboard downstairs. There is no need to keep
a Christmas tree in your loft. That’s asking for trouble, even with a good loft
ladder in place.
Yes, I have a good loft ladder in place.
Being a carer, you go around checking that you can go around checking in
safety. If you find Christmas fun, there’s every reason for Christmas to be
fun…no matter the nature or depth of dementia you care for.
There’s more fun to be had knowing that you
did whatever you could to make safety a priority…and that you did what you
could to make that an ongoing feature of life in the random world.
I hope this new plug works.
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