unfit for purposes

It was making a few funny noises last week but was still operational. The first attempted wash of lightly-soiled winpiglet-wrappers resulted in a non-emptying drum, worsened with each test dial-reset. I'd cleaned out the drain filter last week and verified on Tuesday evening that there was nothing blocking the drain, nor the drain hose and so on. The general absence of anything happening at the points during any cycles when it should have been emptying usually turns out to be a knackered pump. Since observing the machine during the pre-purchase visits and greeting it when we moved in we'd been expecting it to probably die some time this year with the increased workload but just not quite as soon. Not knowing or trusting anyone nearby who fixes these things and not knowing where to get new washing machine pumps and expecting that parts and labour would be well on the way towards a new machine we just went for a new machine, though only after a fun afternoon attempting to find an actual physical shop with actual physical machines in which could be picked up from the premises with the aid of the in-laws' larger car (though I'm fairly certain that the washing machine currently in the flat was transported from the shop to the flat in our current weecar). Despite the convenience the internet should lend the process of checking the stock levels in a shop it doesn't seem to be possible as most shops' websites' ordering processes are detached from the shop and operated from central warehouses. Similarly, contacting individual shops by any means other than wandering into them seems to be increasingly difficult, though Comet (despite their other manifold faults) did manage to be able to explain over the electric telephone what they had in stock and how much they wanted for each.

After remaining mostly calm whilst meeting one set of his grandparents for the first time, remaining quite quiet throughout the journey from cot to car-seat thence house to car to flat, being not apparently bothered by being taken out to then out of the car again, carried around one electrical appliance showroom then dangled across a car park and taken round another, being driven back by a slightly weird route to the house, taken briefly back inside and then taken back to the flat when Nicky took her parents back up there (leaving their car here on Free Parking) the wingpiglet chose the return journey after a feed and change in the flat to start screaming his face off properly for the first time. If I lean right back in the seat when stopped at lights I can just see his face but Nicky's lower and further forward head-position meant she couldn't see him and no amount of singing or speaking was able to calm him down until she could get him out when back. It's fortunate that being fed immediately returns him to a calm and mostly immobile state and that after a feed he sometimes remains sufficiently immobile for sufficiently long to get him changed without him starting to wriggle too much.