Peevish Pen: If It Ain't Broke . . .

. . . but it is.

We've had a couple of breakdowns this week. Our washing machine, which was a few years old when we moved here fifteen years ago, stopped switching gears. It would fill with water and agitate. And agitate. And agitate, etc., until It was manually changed to rinse. Then it would keep agitating until manually changed again. This made doing laundry a real nuisance. My electrical engineer husband did some trouble-shooting and determined the problem was with the switch.

He ordered a part which should be here in a day or two. Meanwhile, the laundry is piling up. I have at least three—maybe four—loads waiting to be done. The basket of whites is over-flowing.

Ditto for the basket of colors (with my favorite green socks on top).

The other problem involves my iMac, which I bought in early 2009. It's pictured here behind Dylan, who spends way too much time on my desk.

Actually the iMac is fine (at least so far), but the keyboard developed a problem: the caps lock key decided to become non-functional. Its LED light no longer shines, and it no longer holds itself down. It won't even work if I hold it down.

Now, I could swap out the keyboard for one from one of the older Macs downstairs, but I love this flat keyboard. I Googled around to see if I could find a way to fix it. I tried disconnecting it from the computer and reconnecting. Didn't work. I tried restarting. Nope. I looked up some of the Apple forums. No help. I watched some YouTube videos and became truly discouraged.

Turns out that removing the keys to see if there's some gunk underneath can be a bit tricky. And removing the larger keys is even trickier. Trickier still is removing a larger key that has an LED light in it—like the caps lock key.

Then I discovered that a couple other keys on the left edge of the keyboard don't work either, which explains why I have asterisks instead of a tilde at the bottom of this post.

So, I'll break down and buy a new keyboard. That seems like the easiest thing to do. Unless Dylan (Did I mention he spends way too much time on my desk?) comes up with a way to fix it.