Merry Xmas Everyone!

I hope you had a very merry Xmas, with family friends and plenty of good food. I certainly did being invited to Xmas lunch by dear guests. I gave a thought to those working like my eldest daughter who is a nurse, and her partner and toddler were away far to the north. Down south the firefighters were hard at it as well. Firefighters up here in the tropical north got the day off I hope, and with a monsoon trough squatting over the Cape, you couldn’t set fire to Possum Valley forest with a flame thrower.
I find it rather strange that we celebrate the birth of a god most of us don’t believe in. However I can’t see Australia giving up the family time, friend time, and partying anytime soon. Those of a religious bent can add their particular rituals to the festivities, but we have to admit it is largely a secular and commercial orgy of self-indulgence.
One down side of Xmas comes if the clothes dryer ceases to function just before xmas. You might consider it a minor inconvenience, but if you run a B&B that gets through mountains of linen, then it becomes a calamity to rival the Titanic. With the monsoon trough allowing not the slightest chance of drying anything, even under cover, I found myself in Ravenshoe at the launderette. Which I found had closed some time ago and I had failed to notice. As one does when the proud owner of a functioning U-beaut gas dryer. So I crept furtively into the laundry of the Roadhouse/caravan park, past the sign “Strictly for Use of Residents Only!” and spent hours of misery and boredom feeding coins to the insatiable machine.
I had tried to fix it, but it has a complex system of sensors, safety devices, controls and circuitry to rival the Gordian Knot. I exhausted my expertise after checking the wiring for being eaten by rodents and cleaning the electrical connections. I searched the internet for gas clothes dryers to find a multitude on sale. Closer inspection revealed that only about half advertised were actually available, none were physically present in Far North Queensland, if indeed in the country, and the best I could normally expect was delivery in “about” 2-3 weeks. Except it is now Xmas and all bets are off.
The next day, I had the fortune to have a guest and friend arrive who is a techie who services transmission towers and such. He applied a multi-meter to every wire and device and came to the conclusion that one of the two gas release solenoid switches was only working intermittently.  I was doubly blessed when next day a mate of his came to stay with him and even more knowledgeable in electrical systems.  How lucky can you get when in the pits of despair, two expert people show up in the middle of the rainforest and are prepared to spend their holiday time diagnosing my dryer?  They also paid for accommodation.  It did occur to me to offer a discount, but I was pretty sure they would have shoved the money down my shirt anyway.

The result is I may not have to get a new dryer costing perhaps $2000-$2500, which may not arrive until the sun becomes a red giant, and the parts required are probably the cheapest little bits of the whole machine.  The bummer is that it is Xmas and the whole company that supplies the parts has buggered off to celebrate the coming of a god they don’t believe in, and they won’t be back until well into the new year.  Merry Christmas everybody.