The Oy's of Home-Ownership

The bank managing my mother's estate let me know a couple of weeks ago that ownership of her house has been turned over to me.  Naturally, things have started breaking.

It is monsoon season, which means occasional, strong rainstorms.  It also apparently means that the roof leaked again over the upstairs bathroom.  ("Wasn't this already fixed earlier this year, Cap'n?" you may well ask.  "It was supposed to be," I may well reply.)

Since I already have to be home for the roofers, I might as well have the plumber come, too.  The master bathroom toilet has been trickling for months (or would be, if I didn't keep the water to it turned off at the wall), and there's some tank (might be a filtration system) in the garage, which hasn't been touched in the nearly five years I've been at the house, and I know nothing about (I don't know who convinced or conned my mother into installing it, whatever it turns out to be), so I figure it's overdue for a checkup.

I might as well have as many repairs taken care of that I can, so I'm also having a glass repair service come to patch the multiple "stars" on my windshield (yet another downfall of a long, highway commute).

Unfortunately, the appliance repair service can't come until Thursday afternoon, so I'll have to lose more time at work.  (Thankfully, that will fall in a different pay period.)  This is for the most recent and the oldest repairs.  Just this weekend, the refrigerator compartment stopped cooling -- although the freezer compartment still works.  (There went my milk and eggs and leftovers and...)  I brushed the coils beneath the unit, but it didn't help.  Since I have to miss work anyway, and since I have to pay for a service call, I might as well get my money's worth, so the repairman will also look at the non-igniting burners on the stove and the non-functioning clock/timer on the oven.  Those have been problems since well before my mom's passing, but better to pay for just what's needed than to buy a whole new stove/oven (or refrigerator/freezer).

Oy vey.

Must've Been Some Knife!

It always amuses me when people publish newspaper headlines that mean more than the writer or editor intended.  I've finally found one myself.

The front page of the Tuesday, July 30, 2019 edition of the Albuquerque Journal included this headline above the fold:  "BCSO:  Woman fatally shot by deputies armed with knife".

The way I read it, the deputies used a knife to shoot the woman.  (Some feat!)  They probably meant that the woman was armed with a knife.  Rewriting the headline as "Woman armed with knife fatally shot by deputies" isn't any better, though.  Then it sounds as if the knife was killed.

Let's stick in a couple of commas, and it should be good to go.  "Woman, armed with knife, fatally shot by deputies".