Naughty Boy

I have been busy trying to solve my various financial woes. I've taken steps to consolidate and reduce some expenses to help prevent such potential disaster in the future. Without going into boring detail I have also managed to pay enough money to keep my fuel coming for another month. Compared with some former difficulties, this one was actually fairly easy to deal with.

One of the things I did was switch my satelite TV to the company that owns the phone service. By so doing I was also able to lower my DSL payment by five dollars because the same company owns that, too (and people used to think Ma Bell had a monopoly). An unexpected consequence of this was that Patrick chewed up one of my new hearing aids. I had it in my hand as I was talking to the TV programmer on the phone after the new dish had been installed. She asked me to do something with the remote control, so I absent-mindedly put it down on the coffee table. Almost immediately I became conscious of my own empty hand, but it was too late. He who eats nails, staples, paper towels, paint tubes, rocks, and everything else he can get into his mouth was on the floor chowing down on my $1500. hearing aid. I jumped to retrieve it, but it was in pieces. My emotions bypassed surprise, panic, anger, and regret, landing immediately on resignation. Without so much as a miss in my conversaation with the woman on the phone, I pried it from between Patrick's pointy little teeth. Amazingly, it was still whistling, and I could see that two of the largest pieces were held together by a wire the size of a hair. Dangling from the middle of this hair was a tiny metal square and a few other miniscule parts--apparently the workings of the entire thing. After the phone call was over, I stuffed the innards back into the body and, using small pieces of masking tape, I taped the largest pieces into a shape reminiscient of the original. When I put it in my ear, the fit left a little to be desired, but it nonetheless functions.

I have an appointment at the Hearing Center in Bangor in the middle of February to have a new mold made. Sigh...................