I'm Fixing a Hole Where the Rain Gets In...

Well, I finally managed to get up onto my roof and to apply some sealant gunk to the holes where (I think) the water was leaking in. I still have to coat the whole roof, but that project is going to have to wait until next weekend. (Assuming it doesn't rain. Which I really, really hope it doesn't.) While I was up there, I had intended to drain and winterize my swamp cooler, but I'm afraid that still needs to be done. See, this is what a complete and utter ignoramous I am when it comes to this "household maintenance" stuff: I couldn't find the drain hole. According to my Mobile Home Fix-It Guide, which is the only guide I have at the moment, there should be a drain plug on "the base of the unit" that I should unplug and hook the garden hose up to. But unless it's very cleverly disguised, it doesn't appear to exist. (Advice from anybody who actually knows anything at all about swamp coolers would, needless to say, be appreciated.)

Anyway. On a more amusing note, as I was lying on the couch this afternoon, all tired and dirty from having been climbing on the roof, and all annoyed at having failed at a task as trivial as draining the water out of my swamp cooler, I started thinking about what these irritating but completely mundane problems would be like if my life were anything at all like those TV shows I'm always rattling on about here:

If my life were like Star Trek, I'd've come home the day the roof started leaking and ordered Scotty to fix it. And he'd've said something like, "But, Captain, ye canna fix a roof in a rainstorm! It's never been done!" And I would have said, "Scotty, you've got to try! If that roof doesn't get fixed, the whole trailer is going to blow!" And he would have said, "Aye, Captain, I'll try, but dinna guarantee anything." And there would have been a few tense moments with music going "BA dum, BA dum, BA dum, BA dum" in the background, and then in about ten minutes it would be fixed, probably just before the Klingons next door got the chance to fire disruptors at me.

If my life were like Blake's 7, the roof would fix itself. Unless it was the fourth season, in which case I'd have to go out and steal some crystals -- I don't know why, but it always had to be crystals -- in order to repair it, only the crystals would turn out to be bait in a trap, and I'd be lucky to get out with my skin intact, let alone my roof.

If my life were like Doctor Who, every household malfunction would lead to an exciting adventure. Like, the water leaking in from the roof would get into the circuitry in the walls that keeps my trailer anchored at this point in spacetime, and I'd suddenly find myself in the Jurassic or someplace. Where there'd undoubtedly be an evil fellow time-traveller plotting to change history so that humanity never evolved.

If my life were like Farscape, I'd go out and hire a roofing contractor, who would then proceed to try to cheat me out of large sums of money, steal my trailer, and sell me out to people who wanted to take my brain apart so they could learn my secret brownie recipe. (Not that my brownie recipe is all that secret, but I needed an analogy.)

If my life were like Buffy, I'd discover my roof was leaking, and I'd start looking through books for what to do about it, probably finding a lot of stuff that was vague and difficult to understand. And then I'd set out to do something about it, and there would be a lot of dangerous activity, but things would probably turn out to be not quite what I thought they were, and I'd have to do some more research and maybe talk to someone who actually knew something about roofs before I was actually able to get up there and stop the leak, most likely in a frantic burst of activity and just in time to keep the entire house from collapsing, thus magically opening up a portal to Hell and destroying the world.

Hmm. You know, except for the destroying-the-world thing, that last one sounds disturbingly close to the truth...