Broken Stuff Karma

Just a small rant for the morning -- this fall, everything is breaking. To date, things that have gone down include:

the main computer in the office (replaced and then resurrected as the garage computer)

my Garmin bike GPS (replaced; Chad dissected the dead one in preparation for fixing the flakiness in his)

the Roomba's bumper sensor (diagnosis/repair still in progress)

my kindle (warrantee replacement coming in the mail)

Nim of course is most upset about her wind-up whale bath toy, whose tail fell off. Waaaa.

That's not the worst of it, though.

Sunday morning, we went to start the truck, only to find that several warning lights came on. It was also running pretty rough. Given that the vehicle is still pretty new, we assumed that maybe there was some defect that would be fixed under warrantee. Maybe rain got in and fried its little brain, or something rattled loose, or the like.

Not so. Much more diabolical.

Chad got a call from the shop after they got it on the lift and the report was "Rodent chewed up cyl 3 harness"

Eh? Rats are eating the wiring in the car? To the tune of a couple thousand dollars of repair work? Devouring my tomatoes is one thing, but this is ridiculous! This means war.

On calling the car insurance, I found that "Rats ate my car's wiring" is not an unheard-of claim (and fortunately is a covered event). And of course, one can find all sorts of tales of woe/tall tales on this subject if one uses the power of Google. Apparently, rodents quite like some of the new soy-based plastics used on wiring in the last 10 or so years, if you believe everything you read.

We already know these vermin are not nesting in our yard; they have enough range to be coming from one of the larger brush-filled yards nearby. I just picked up some more traps and sent in the online request for the county vector control people to come out and investigate where the beasties are coming from.

Maybe we need a pet snake in addition to a pet barn owl. It wouldn't take care of the various broken electronics gizmos in the house, but it would be satisfying to watch the vermin be decisively defeated. Chomp.

Unfair. Argh.