I can remember my mother telling me that trouble comes in threes. That must be some sort of old wives' tale, but I'm not out to prove such things true - I have enough to worry about.

I did, however, find several things on the breaking side of things last week. First, my battery went out on my pickup, the 1996 Chevrolet I bought earlier this year. Since it is a diesel, it takes two batteries and the manufacturer recommends replacing both at once. Go figure.

I was fortunate to find them on sale here and be able to buy both for a reasonable price. No matter, it was still more than $100, which set me back on my road to financial hardship.

On the bright side, I found out later that one of the two old batteries is still good, so I kept it for future use. It's not like I need to have more clutter around, but I can't see scrapping a perfectly good battery.

After I bought the two batteries and started replacing them, I managed to drop one of my sockets. I shook the truck, tried to reach under the battery and crawled underneath to try and find it. I finally figured out that it must have landed somewhere under the plastic battery box. Since it had fallen out of sight, I had to first remove the battery holder bolt and block and then the battery holder box to get down to it. I'm just glad it didn't fall somewhere even harder to reach.

The battery was out fairly quickly, with only two bolts and one big one holding it down. But with bolts in the firewall and above the tire and some kind of a clip system, it took several minutes to figure out how to get the battery box removed. It turns out that the battery sits on top of the washer fluid reservoir and the socket was laying there just waiting for me to find it.

After I re-installed the battery holder, I then put in first one battery and then started to replace the other. That's when I found out that the bolt on my side-post battery had already been attacked with a pair of pliers at some time in the past. Once that has happened, it can only be removed with pliers or Vice Grips, so I did my best to get it out.

After installing my second battery, I found an extra bolt laying on the front of the truck. That's when I realized that I had left out one of the bolts on the battery box.

So I had to remove the battery again, put the bolt back in and re- install it.

After such a challenging job, I was ready for the satisfaction of an easy starting truck. However, when I turned the key, I was rewarded with little more than a ‘click.' Since I replaced the starter only a few months ago, I was pretty sure it wasn't bad again. However, I couldn't figure out what was going on.

After asking for some help from the friendly neighborhood mechanic, he told me that the cables on trucks like mine are notorious for getting corroded and causing the connection to fail.

Realizing by now that I had already exhausted my limited supply of patience for the week, I just pulled the truck up the hill with a chain and roll-started it to drive it over to the garage. He had it fixed in just a few minutes. It always kills me when they do that. After the mechanic replaced my plier-chewed battery post and a spacer in the cable attachment, the truck started like a new one. After getting past that problem at an unexpected cost of around $150 (including the batteries and the simple repair), I then had to put fuel in it as well, ringing up another $50 while I was in town. I just didn't have the heart to fill it up.

I suppose I need to work on my love of spending money. It might be easier if I could also work on my ability to earn more money, but that's a problem for another time. I have enough to worry about. After that was fixed, the dishwasher broke down in the kitchen. The thing was filling up with water and then emptying itself, but it wouldn't wash. Preparing for the worst, I went ahead and wrote off all discretionary spending at least through Christmas.

After taking apart the screen system and looking for a blockage, I realized that this, too, was above and beyond my mechanical abilities. While carpentry work isn't impossible for me, this other stuff gets past me fairly quickly. I can do plumbing and electrical for a house, but ask me to fix a toaster and you're on your own.

My father once told me that I should try to learn something from everything that happens, especially the things that are less than positive. I filed that away somewhere, but I find wisdom from the dead batteries and broken dishwashers hard to grasp. (It's sort of like that air that floats out when I open my wallet).

Since the dishwasher repairman couldn't make it by for about three or four days, I am left hanging in suspense. Since the thing was only about $300 new, I don't expect to pay much more than half that to fix it. Even though it's only two years old now, it may already be on its way to that great dishwasher repository in the sky. With the world made of plastic and silicon circuit boards, its no wonder that things just don't seem to last like they used to.

All the things I have that are the best are the oldest: Cast iron cookware, stainless steel measuring cups and bowls, my shoe shine kit and many of my hand tools. Sadly, even good things wear out after 40 years of use or more and there doesn't seem to be a source to replace most of those things with new things of equal quality.

When the 1950s electric iron that I had for some 15 years finally died, I had to buy a new plastic model that weighed some 10 pounds less, but only lasted for a few years before it had to be thrown away. I also had a cappuccino machine that I had been using for a while that decided to come up lame. I acquired it from a store that closed down in Winston-Salem. I threw it away last week after spending quite a bit of my time trying, unsuccessfully I might add, to figure out how to fix it.

If bad news does come in threes, I'll hope two batteries, a dishwasher and a cappuccino maker have it all well covered.

At least I found my glasses this week. They were over the sun visor of my old truck, where I apparently had left them on some earlier occasion. I had thought that I remembered putting them over the sun visor, in the truck, but I was looking in the wrong truck.

If the battery hadn't gone bad on the other truck, I might never have found my glasses there.

Perhaps I should find a way to look for the silver lining wherever it may be found when things seem to be going wrong. But even if I find it, I might have to try and mine it out to help pay for all these repairs.

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