Valhalla

We live in a world where things fall apart. If you've read the the name of this blog on your way to my typically pithy comments, you understand that I tend to revel in the amount of disorder in a system. Things move from an ordered state to a less ordered state. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
That's why I expect to have to repair and replace things on a regular basis. The older I get, the more resistant I am to simply scrapping whatever appliance or household item when their usefulness begins to deteriorate. This ensures that we will go through our share of duct tape and glue. We will, as a household, have a vast array of screwdrivers for opening up small cavities to see if the batteries are, in fact, replicable. I will admit that a good deal of this mania is built upon my wife's insistence that we never add to the ever expanding landfill. It also brings great satisfaction to me when a machine can be resurrected. Having that power over life and death, at least in the appliance world, is completely gratifying.
Then there was the matter of our bathroom scale. I went to step on it the other day, and the digital readout came back as a black splotch. I tried to make sense of this information, assuming that I no longer weighed anything, and all of my exercise goals had been achieved. Then I decided to inspect further, using a big toe to try and clear whatever gunk might have been obscuring the screen. I understand that using all these technical terms like "splotch" and "gunk" may be causing some of you to lose the thread of this story, but what I eventually concluded was that the liquid crystal display had been cracked. The scale was, alas, a goner.
I carried the carcass to the front door, where my wife told me she was willing to take it the final few yards to our electronic waste pile. She confessed to having dropped our Sonicare toothbrush on the scale, causing the crack and we both shared a moment of silence at the passing. And then we took come solace in the notion that she would eventually cart the scale and a number of other dead soldiers off to a facility that makes a project out of reinvigorating the damaged and defective appliances that have exceeded our patience and abilities. It goes now to a better place.