The Curmudgeonly Professor

In My Eighty-First Year: Curses Upon My Worthless New Refrigerator

Two years ago I bought a new Whirlpool refrigerator to replace the nine-year-old Amana that gave up the ghost.  Refrigerators used to last 25 years.  I thought since the Amana only lasted nine years, maybe Whirlpool would be better.  Little did I know.

Two weeks after the Whirlpool was delivered and installed, the freezer door went kaput.  A new door was ordered and replaced after we left for St. George for the winter.  The old door remained in the garage until we returned to SLake in the spring.  The explanation was, we just deliver the new door, we don't pick up the old one.  So we tried the fridge with the new door.  The icemaker kept jamming.  We left again for St. George. Upon returning, the icemaker went kaput.  Not once, but a half dozen times. Fortunately, we had bought a 4 year extended warranty, something I seldom do.  We had about a half dozen service calls on the freezer door and the ice maker.  Finally, the repair guy said he couldn't fix it and would order a new freezer door.  The new freezer door arrived yesterday.  Even though my wife and I were home all day, the delivery people kindly plunked the big tall box on the front door and went on their merry way.  Of course, the repair guys are closed until Monday and I can't lift the box to put it in the garage, so there it will repose until Monday.  Maybe someone will steal it.  I hope.

We have tried to argue that we should get a new fridge from Whirlpool after all this grief, misery, suffering, and cursing.  Not so fast, Whirlpool says.  You don't get a new fridge until you have made 4 service calls.  But, I opined and whined, we have had 5 service calls and 2 new doors.  Well, the Whirlpool geniuses said, you don't get a new fridge until you get 4 service calls on 4 different issues, and you have had 5 service calls on the same issue, viz., the freezer door and the ice maker.  The 5 service calls you have had on the ice maker and freezer door count only as ONE service call.  The genius of it all!  What marketing and warranty wizardry!  Moreover, the service techs, who really are nice guys, in contrast to the wonderful folks at Whirlpool, don't get paid for multiple service calls on the same issue, since they were expected to fix it the first time, no matter how many parts they had to order or how many times they came back.

Thus, we have another object lesson in the Curmudgeonly Professor's Laws of Modern Technology: (1) nothing ever works; (2) if it quits working, no one can fix it, (3) If it does get fixed, it won't stay fixed very long.  As John Maynard Keynes once opined in his immortal statement in his famous economic treatise still cursed by conservatives since Keynes argues for rational fiscal policy, "In the long run we are all dead."  In the mean time, I need a fridge.

Red Leafed Plant on Temple Square SLCity UT

I need a botanist and flower expert to help me identify names of all the plants and flowers I'm posting.

LDS Temple Spires SLCity Ut

Little Orange and Yellow Daisies, Maybe, from Temple Square Flower Gardens SLCity UT

All images on the blog are copyrighted.  For use permission, please ask me.  This photo, as are many others on this blog, are matted in the wonderful QuickMats 4 matting software.  As for all my photos, they are more fun and more revealing to look at if you take time to double click and enlarge for detail.

Photos from the Gardens at Temple Square SLCity UT

After three days of hard labor, I finished editing, deleting, and cleaning up 350 photos I took when I accompanied my son Jim and my wife to Temple Square on my birthday on Monday September 17. Some of the photos are quite good, some are so-so, a few are blurry, but each is a piece of my tour of the gardens and so I'll post some not-so-perfect photos anyway.  After deleting about 50 and cropping another 50, I ended up with 321 images.  At three images per day, that gives me 107 days worth of images to post on the Curmudgeonly Professor blog.  So I may not have to take another photo for three months.  However, I know I'll see some straggly end-of-summer flower just waiting to get zonked by the first frost and I'll want to save it along with all of the perfect flowers as a reminder of the wonderful gift that flowers give to all of us.  I hope you like my photos.  I'll dribble them out over the coming weeks.  I just wish I knew the names of all of them.  Perhaps my viewers can help me.

Posies from the Flower Gardens at SLCity Temple Square posted September 20 2012

Ten Things the Curmudgeonly Professor has Learned in 80 Years

Old people are supposed to be saturated with wisdom from their long years of learning things by trial and error.  Here are ten things the Curmudgeonly Professor has learned in his 80 years of life:

1. Electricity and electric lights are preferable to kerosene lamps.  Electricity came to our little valley where I was raised when I was seven.
2. Northern tissue is preferable to old Monkey Ward and Sears Roebuck catalogues and Collier's magazines.
3. We got just as excited listening to Jack Armstrong the All American Boy on the radio as any youngster gets watching TV today.
4. You can get by without indoor plumbing.  I left home in 1950 at the age of 17.  My parents did not get indoor plumbing until a few years after I left.
5. You can get by without a telephone.  My parents did not get a telephone until a few years after I left home.
6. It takes a long time to hoe ten acres of sugar beets.
7. Learning to drive the Model A Ford at the age of 13 was a lot of fun.
8. Two hours a day was a lot of time to spend riding the school bus from Penrose to our school in Powell WY.
9. It was hard to bring my tuba home on the school bus so I could practice on it by playing to the cows.
10. Love, safety, and fun are more important than anything invented after 1932 or anything you had to go without.

From the Flower Gardens at Temple Square SLCity UT posted September 20 2012

The Curmudgeonly Professor Turns 80

Yes, dear reader, the Curmudgeonly Professor has become an even more ancient geezer than he was two days ago.  Monday September 17 was my 80th birthday.  I never thought I would live that long but, on the other hand, I never intended to die either.  Now I must face up to the fact that I am really, really old.  Many people my age have already passed to the Great Beyond.  Others are written up in the obits as having gone their way "due to incidents of old age."  I am not sure that young people today are much in awe of old people because most young people by the age of 5 are more tech savvy than the average geezer.  No one ever has to ask a geezer for info because kids can ask Google, who knows all, and the info is likely to be more up-to-date and reliable than stuff I make up.

After three days of lunches, parties, and being the center of attention I am now abandoned and on my own once again.  I asked my wife last night what she was going to do for my birthday yesterday, one day past the 17th, to which she replied "nothing."  But, I protested, you said you loved me in your birthday card.   Well, she says, I don't love you that much.  Saturday was lunch with my wife and her two sisters and a trip to the farmer's market.  As I was buying corn, some maniac jumped up right in front of me and got in my face.  I was about to clobber this maniac when I realized it was my son Jim from California who had made a special trip to surprise me.  He had pulled this stunt once before, when my wife and I were in one car and Jim and family were in another and I left an hour before he did for southern California.  At Hesperia, just at the top of Cajon Pass, some maniac jumped up in front of me while paying for gas and about gave me a heart attack.  Turns out it was Jim.  Jim claimed I was driving really, really slow.

I had given my wife and sons explicit instructions not to have a birthday bash because it would make me feel self conscious.  Sunday we were on our way over to my other son Russell's for Sunday dinner when, suddenly, my son Jim pulled into the HOA club house at Russell's neighborhood.  I'm doomed, I said.  I was met with balloons, crepe paper, small great grandchildren trooping up to me with their handwritten birthday cards, and about 30 posterity and family.  How was I to know.  I didn't think anyone would care that I had turned 80 because they would merely think I was an even bigger grouch and, besides, I am a Democrat, and, heaven knows why, they are all Republicans.  But I did escape from what actually was a wonderful party with a new super-duper-top-of-the-line iPad, which I had been coveting for some time.  Now I can enter the realm of the unsociables who sit around at a get together twiddling their thumbs over their iPhones and iPads and ignore everyone else in the room.  I also was blessed with a digital photo frame and a few other odds and ends and cards.

Monday, my actual birthday, was then a trivial day since all the celebrating, singing, etc. had vanished.  My daughter-in-law, Susan, had given me a "Nixon now more than ever" button years ago and apologized for not being able to find another George Bush birthday card, a genre with which she had aggravated me several times in recent years.  So I prevailed on son Jim to haul me to Temple Square in downtown SLCity on Monday so I could take pictures of the flowers.  I was then in 7th heaven for a couple of hours, trying to find and photograph every different flower in the magnificent flower beds of Temple Square itself and the large Church Office Plaza flower gardens just to the east of the temple.  Then we went to lunch at the Nauvoo Room in the former Hotel Utah, now the Joseph Smith Building.  The Hotel Utah holds a special place for my wife and me since that is where we stayed nearly 60 years ago (this coming December) when we came from Laramie WY over icy roads to be married in the Salt Lake LDS Temple.

Now, apparently, my birthday is over.  Twenty three facebook wishes,which is a lot more friends than I thought I had.  An annual birthday card from my neighbor in St. George who deliberately flies his big red U of Utah flag whenever he thinks it will irritate me.  There were no cards yesterday.  No emails.  I had to fix my own lunch.  I had pleaded for a trip to Panda Express for some walnut shrimp, but my piteous pleas fell on deaf ears.  I came to the realization that my birthday was over, that no one cared one whit now.

So today I am still editing the 350 photos I took of the wonderful flowers at Temple Square.  For three wonderful days I was at peace with my friends and family, grateful beyond measure for the blessings of life, and for my wonderful wife who engineered all of these surprises despite her chronic pain even though I knew I wasn't worthy of any surpirse for being such an annoying (but entertaining, please) husband.  For two wonderful hours I lived among the flower gardens of Temple Square and now I can live with the photos I took which will long outlive the flowers themselves, soon to be victims to the harbingers of frost and autumn.  Life may be uncertain, but, as my wife's physician in St. George keeps reminding us, we are grateful for one day at a time.  May your life be as rewarding as mine has been for eight decades.

From the flower gardens at Temple Square and the Church Office Plaza.

Flower Gardens at LDS Temple Square SLCity UT September 19 2012

Flower Gardens at LDS Temple Square SLCity UT

The Sunrise Fighting its Way Through the Smoke of Idaho Wildfires Drifting Into the Salt Lake Valley Sept 18 2012