General update: The bulleted list

• My leaky kitchen is now dry, although it does have a hole in it that looks pretty permanent.
  
  
• My hot water has been re-wired and works fine.
  
  
• My laundry room light fixture was 'sploding bulbs, and I told my landlady. When I came back from out of town to find the rest of the work done, and noticed that one of the kitchen bulbs had been moved to the (previously empty) laundry room socket, I assumed that the switch had been made to test the newly repaired fixture.
  
  
• That was not a sound assumption.
  
  
• Picking shards of broken light bulb out of two-week old dirty laundry - it doesn't get any better than that.
  
  
• The tune up did not fix my car. In fact, if anything I'm getting slightly poorer mileage than before.
  
  
• Even knowing the inevitable result, it is impossible to watch children stir ice cream into a creamy soup without letting them in on the childhood mantra: The more you stir, the more you get. (With its corollary: if you stir long enough, it turns into butter.)