Going Cuckoo

Since we observed Remembrance Day yesterday, we spent today sleeping in (because we stayed up way too late last night playing games with friends), going to get our cuckoo clock repaired, and then playing more games with friends. It was a good start and finish to our day with a slightly frustrating middle. 

We bought a cuckoo clock when we were in Germany at the end of September and for maybe half a week it worked perfectly. Everybody loved it and Jared, who has wanted one for decades, was especially happy to finally have a cuckoo clock. Sadly, after a few days it stopped working correctly. The door for the little zither man that pops out and plays music on the half and full hour became stuck in the open position, then the music stopped playing, after that the cuckoo bird wouldn't come out and cuckoo at each hour, and eventually the clock wouldn't keep the correct time. Jared tried to fix it by following some troubleshooting videos he found online, but it just wouldn't work. 

We boxed it up and then it sat in a corner while Jared was TDY in Texas. Now that he's back home we're working on getting this problem figured out again. We can't just drive back to the store where we bought it and return the thing.  It is still covered by a warranty so Jared looked at the list of authorized repair centers and we found that one of them is just over thirty miles from here. Jared called the repair guy and set up an appointment for late this morning. Only in England does it take over an hour to drive 30 miles! There are no direct roads anywhere and even though most of the roads we drove on today had a speed limit of 60 mph we would have been dead in a ditch if we'd actually driven that fast. At least the scenery was nice?

When we arrived at the address, it was just a little house where a kind old man answered the door. I think the entire downstairs was smaller than Natalie and Samantha's room here at home, but somehow this guy repairs cuckoo clocks in his closet of a kitchen off of a teeny little living room. We took our clock out of the box and explained the problem and he spent about an hour figuring out what was going wrong and fixing things so it would work again. Jared was able to watch him fix the problems and even helped with parts of the repair. Once it was good to go, he carefully put our clock back in the box and sent us on our way.

As soon as we got home Jared took the clock back out of the box and hung it up on the wall and it did. not. work. He was so frustrated that I think he was seriously considering chopping the whole thing to bits and burning it in our fire pit out back. We really have no idea what happened during the drive home to make it a useless piece of wood and machinery again. Jared set up a makeshift stand that held the clock while he opened up the back and tinkered with its insides. I'm so glad he chose to leave the hatchet in the garage and use what he learned from the clock guy to fix the problem. It's now working perfectly and we're once again enthralled with its twice-hourly performances.