Live and Learn

Shortly after posting yesterday's entry, I went out to the deck refrigerator (purchased last month) where the milk and eggs are stored, only to find the refrigerator was dead.  No lights, no humming.  Same symptoms as the previous fridge.  So much for high hopes for the day.  I called the appliance store.  "Did you check the breaker?"  I'd already done that.  "Is there a GFI (ground fault interrupter)?"  I didn't think so.  "Get a lamp and plug it into the socket to see if that works."  I got a lamp, but the plug for the fridge was hard to remove.  And then I saw it.  There was a GFI!  Plain white, not the red and black I was used to in the house.  Pushed the little button and voila!  Appliance Guy explained patiently that one could not run a refrigerator on a socket with a GFI.  I explained to him, just as patiently, that a refrigerator had been plugged in there for the previous eleven years.  "Oh."  It seems I had prematurely pronounced the old fridge dead.  I moved the plug over to the other socket.  I won't make that mistake again.

Hopes raised once more, a good portion of the sunny afternoon was spent picking up fallen branches in the front yard.  There were fewer this year than last; only one heaping cartfull to haul to the burn pile.  Except it's too late to burn, not because of fire danger, but because the birds have already built their nests in the thicket.  They've also constructed their nurseries on the beams in the barn.  I've watched them gathering grasses and fluff and tucking them away in the corners high up.  There's a regular colony up there.  I wish the barn swallows would follow the sparrows' example.  The cats rarely go down to the goat barn, whereas they always hang out in the feed barn where we had the swallows tragedy last year.  In this case, it would be learn and live.