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New theme for the blog, which will be refined in the coming days and weeks.

A general feeling of despair over politics, but feeling pretty strongly that we will muddle through, somehow, no matter what the pols do or don’t do.

And looking for the good things that will get us to the other side of the muddle.

Life seemed wonderful and I felt like an empowered consumer when dealing with contractors Hoppe Tree Service and Ihn Plumbing and Foundation Repair.

Then there was Dell.

I turned to Dell when my HP, which was problematic from the day I bought it, finally and completely died after just 2 1/2 years. Just. Like. That. In the middle of some task, it was gone. There are many reasons, including this computer’s amazingly short life span, that I did not want to go with HP again.  I tried tech support once, for instance, and the HP guy who kept me on the phone for well over an hour without resolving anything decided my computer desktop had too many things on it. I jokingly asked him if he was the desktop fashion police and naively assumed when he started moving things around (he took command of my computer remotely) that he was tucking them away in a folder.

Nope. He was deleting them. Without asking me or telling me, he just erased what he did not like, including pictures of my husband, who had just died. To say I was upset would be a slight understatement. Thanks to some techie friends I was able to recover some of the deleted files, including the pictures of Dave. I was not able to recover everything, though, and I was very willing never to deal with HP again.

So I turned to Dell and ordered an Inspiron with enough horsepower to do what I needed. Threw in money for Photshop Elements package, figuring to update what I already had.

Got the box and set it up. First problem: the Photoshop Elements was an outdated version, which was very irritating indeed. The newest package has been out for a while now, so there really was no excuse for Dell to foist the old stuff on me.

Started transferring files and downloading my backup stuff, which I store on the cloud. The less-than-a-day-old-computer rebooted. Since I was about 10 feet away and had nothing to do with the reboot, this was not a good thing.

“That’s a problem,” I said to a friend.

Indeed. My brand new computer took to rebooting whenever it felt like it. Now and then, again and again, it would shut down and restart. I Googled the error.

Uh-oh. It was all over the Internet, along with complaints about Dell tech support and how awful it was in helping to resolve the problem. Shoot, I thought, though in a somewhat stronger term.

I made sure my phone was fully charged before I called the dreaded tech support. After about 10 minutes, the guy said Dell would send me a new box. I was glad, but also furious. The quick call to replace told me that Dell was now well aware of the problem and knew that it could not be fixed on the phone. Yet they shipped me a potentially faulty computer anyway. I can just imagine Dell’s calculations — if we ship 3,000 of these boxes and 1,000 are faulty, we reap the profits from the remaining 2,000. Instead of testing all the boxes ourselves, let’s just let our customers test them for us. That way, we avoid the costs of testing each one and all the inconvenience falls to the people dumb enough to order from us!

You betcha it was inconvenient. Wait for the new box. Set it up. Transfer files again. Download backup again. Try to clear the hard drive on the faulty computer. Pack up the faulty computer. Go to the store for the right kind of tape. Use the tape. Take the box with the faulty computer to the Fed Ex store.

So now I don’t like Dell much, either. And my Photshop Elements is still outdated.

I know, I know: buy a Mac.

The best time to use a tree service is in the winter, because there are some pretty nice discounts out there. I had a box elder on the alley that leaned at a scary angle. When it stopped leafing out on some branches, it was time for that box elder to go.

I got a couple bids and went with Hoppe Tree Service, which is right near the neighborhood, at 60th and Wisconsin. Because I am cheap, I asked Hoppe if it would leave me the chips from the tree so I did not have to buy any for mulching purposes in the spring. Hoppe agreed.

The box elder branches were very close to some power lines, so We Energies came out and trimmed a bunch of branches away, leaving them piled up just off the alley in my yard. It snowed, burying the branches under several inches.

Hoppe came, took down the leaner (big circle of rot in the middle, so removal was a fine idea!) and trimmed two others that badly needed trimming. I was satisfied when I saw that, but not so satisfied when I saw that Hoppe did not leave wood chips and did not take away the branches left behind We Energies.

I called Hoppe and the woman who answered the phone told me yes, they did not take the branches and did not leave the chips. The branches were buried too deep under the snow for the guys to try to drag out and there was too much ice and snow in the driveway to leave the chips. I might not have enough room to manipulate the car the way I must to get it in and out of the garage. Hoppe folks would come out when things thawed and melted to take away the branches and leave the chips.

And I thought, “Yeah, right.”

But they did! It took nature a long time and there were many setbacks, but the snow finally melted. Hoppe called about the time the bare ground was finally showing — maybe a month (??) after its original work — and said it would be out the next day to finish up. Sure enough, when I got home from work, the big branches were gone from my yard and there was a pile big pile of wood chips in my driveway, in the exact spot I requested!

How about that for service? Guess I should have asked ‘em to spread the mulch in the gardens, as well.