A car, a house, a computer and kids = trouble

“If you have a kid, a house and a car, you always have trouble.”
That’s how my friend summarized life for her and me. She had asked how I was. It will be a while before she asks again — I told her. I have half a dozen kids (counting stepsons) plus eight grandkids, a house and three older cars.
The only thing that we are not having trouble with right now is the house. (Knock on wood.) Oh, the lawn needs mowing; we have some painting and carpeting to do, but nothing pressing.
The kids, however are a different story. Last week my husband and I went our separate ways to provide emotional support for half of the six children. One was sick, one was dealing with a death and the third had legal problems.
The car situation isn’t much better. As hubby drove north to Indiana, his car broke down — twice. He could not find his IDs and credit cards and called to have me wire him money Everything would have been fine, except he could not get the money I wired him without identification. I had to call back and give him a secret password to share with the cashier before they would give him the cash so he could pay the car repairs.
My car held up through my drive and extended weekend in New Orleans. My daughter, however, was coming home from Hot Springs in a friend’s car when it puttered to a stop before they had left the city’s shadow.
I had the grand privilege of driving up to Hot Springs to get her after work on Monday.
Cars and kids were our trouble last week. After this week, I’m adding one more item to the list: Computers.
Computers are quickly becoming an integral part of our family and work lives., if not a necessity. I work on computers all day, everyday at the news-Times as do my husband, three of our sons and our daughter.
I walked into the office on Wednesday, switched on a computer and told it to prepare a copy of a picture.
The computer pulled up the program, looked at it and flat-out refused to open the file and begin working. The computer acted as if my request was the final straw. It has not worked since.
Photographers, reporters and editors and I had too much to do without that. We had pictures and copy to scan, pages to lay out and text programs to call up and merge. We did not need a computer that was having any troubles. We scrambled to find a creative solution for getting information prepared for the paper.
After a day at computer dependent jobs, I go home and read computer generated mail on our personal computer. Everyone in the family has at least one computer.
The family computers were all working fine until someone decided that we should all upgrade at the same time. The new parts for the upgrade arrived in time to be packed and distributed to households in New Orleans, St. Louis, Elkhart and South Bend, Ind.
Each delivery was followed by hours of frustration as the kids tried to get the new computer parts to take with the old computer parts. After this week, “I have amended my friend’s axiom: ‘If you have a kid, a car and a house, and a computer, you always have trouble.’”


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