The whirligig of time
The most common remark I seem to be making, possibly excluding, "Aren't you cute!" or "I hate this kitchen" seems to be, "I don't know how it got to be [whatever day/month/year it may be at that moment]." Theoretically, I know how it probably did, but my journey through time seems to be quick and irregular.
Last Sunday, when it was brutally hot, Eric and I had just brought Lydy's car home after running some very necessary errands. B, for Behemoth, has a perfectly good air conditioner, but it was not keeping up with the heat index at all. We had collapsed in the media room air conditioning with an attendant young black cat (Ninja, who is very fond of Eric) when my phone tweedled. Raphael had sent a simple message, "Dishwasher just died."
Four or five weeks ago, we had replaced the downstairs dishwasher, which was acquired in 1996 and served to wash all the dishes of the household until R and I got a second dishwasher for the upstairs. Sears said we got it in 2009, but that is not the case; it was more like 2004. Anyway, the downstairs dishwasher did not owe us any money. Around the time of its demise and replacement, the upstairs one started leaking. I got Sears to come out, and there was the usual discussion about whether we should fix or replace it. In addition to the leakage, which was fairly easily dealt with, the tops had snapped off a number of the uprights or pins or whatever they are called, the spaced spikes between which you put plates and so on. These were rusting happily away. The technician said that new racks, while available, were expensive, and we'd probably prefer to just get a new dishwasher if we couldn't stand the rusty racks. We decided to live with them a while longer, but the dishwasher had other plans. Raphael said that when started on that fateful Sunday, it had begun to fill, emitted a loud shrieking noise, and died so utterly that hitting the Cancel button did not cause the water to drain out. Raphael ended up bailing it, finally asking me if we had a turkey baster anywhere in the house -- we have two, though their usual purpose has been for me to squirt water onto French-style bread while it is baking. David uses a squirt bottle for that, when he makes Italian-style bread, but I find the turkey baster easier to aim.
Raphael usually cooks on Sunday, but was already dubious about this because of the weather. The inability to clear the kitchen of accumulated dirty dishes pretty much made the decision for us, and we ordered food from Szechuan Spice, which is excellent but pricy, and hence not much indulged in except to celebrate or to cope with an emergency.
Raphael did some hand-washing of glasses and flatware, and I managed over the next two days to make a pasta salad and later a mock egg salad and some tempeh bacon for sandwiches, in the interstices of the piled and waiting dishes.
Raphael, who does most of the dishwasher-related work upstairs, did some research, and we ordered a new dishwasher, not without a lot of financial trepidation, and Sears said it could be delivered Wednesday. We looked at the front staircase and thought, "Nope." The back staircase is fairly clear. I then looked at the back yard, which is gorgeous but not precisely passable. The sidewalk from the back door out to the garage is much too narrow, so that when I don't mow the daisy fleabane, Shasta daisies, dame's rocket, milkweed, and rudbeckia that find the yard more salubrious than the garden beds intended for their delectation, there is not much space to get by. I had at least, a few weeks earlier, severely pruned back the mock orange and its un-indicted co-conspirator the Virginia creeper, which were hitting in the face anybody rash enough to walk around the side of the garage to take out trash or recycling. But the rest of the yard still seemed unduly hazardous for people wrangling an appliance. I accordingly decided that the Sears people could bring the dishwasher through the first floor and then take it up the back stairs.
On Tuesday evening, we looked at the second-floor landing, and measured the available floor space. The dishwasher is 24 inches wide, and there was more than 24 inches of floor space. I eventually became agitated about the boxes stacked against the wall, and ended up, with some help from Raphael, moving them around and turning the longer ones sideways so that the width of the available floor was uniform. Then I actually got out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the staircase down to where I had already vacuumed and mopped upwards from the basement, the weekend before, for David's WAN party. I also finally, weeks after the stepladder came upstairs so the alarm-company guy could clean out the smoke alarm that was making the system call the central station and say there was a fire, got up on the stepladder, removed the horribly faint LED bulb that has been annoying everybody except David for months, and put in a somewhat alarming compact fluorescent bulb that would allow one to read fine print at any hour, should one wish to do so on a staircase. Then I took the stepladder back to the basement where it belongs, accompanied by a couple of cats for security purposes, or possibly just out of perversity. It was not a very hot day, but it was extremely humid, and I ended up having to turn on my office air conditioner just so that I could dry out.
On Wednesday I got up early (for me) and moved the cat tree, the litter box, a couple of containers with litter-scooping supplies, and a jug of litter off the back stairs and into the first floor. I had already cleared a path through the living and dining rooms and the downstairs kitchen. The litter box was so heavy that I had to partially scoop it before I could pick it up. The downstairs cats were interested, and felt that the hallway outside the bathroom was a perfectly cromulent location for their cat tree -- all but Ninja, who hung out forlornly on the landing where the cat tree had been. Then he got in my way when I decided that I needed to move a few more boxes into the upstairs to create an actual gap in the boxes just at the top of the stairs for a person backing up the steps with a dishwasher to step into before turning the dishwasher onto the landing. Cassie and Saffron helped from the other side by trying to escape downstairs.
Sears had sent an email with very detailed instructions about what householders needed to to and what delivery people would or would not do (NO LIFTING APPLIANCES OVER BANNISTERS OR OBSTACLES). They wanted domestic pets shut up, out of the delivery path. I had figured out an approach for this. For complicated historical reasons, I give the downstairs cats each a quarter can of wet food once a day, usually in the early afternoon. I give Arwen, Ninja, and Nuit their food in the media room, but Naomi, who is actually the intended beneficiary of the food, has to have hers up on a shelf lest either Arwen, who can't jump high, or Nuit, who can but doesn't feel the shelf is her property, eat Naomi's share. So I figured that when Sears called, I would give the three media room cats their food and shut the door on them, and just let Naomi eat as usual, because Naomi would have enough sense to vanish into the basement when she heard people tromping around in the front of the house.
The Sears people called to say they were ten minutes out. I washed out the cat bowls, filled them, and put three of them down in the media room, at which point I saw that Nuit was absent. Naomi, seeing a spare bowl, bolted into the media room and began to eat. I shut the door on the three of them and decided I'd just have to keep an eye out for Nuit. Then I rushed back upstairs and shut Cassie and Saffron into the front of the upstairs. They hang out there anyway, and fortunately had not conspired with Nuit to change their schedules too. The Sears people really did arrive in ten minutes. There was a supervisor, an efficient young woman who ten years ago would have had a clipboard, but who now had a cell phone whose battery was about to die. These are also very common among UPS and FedEx drivers. Technology is not quite keeping up somehow. Then two young men brought the dishwasher along on a dolly, praising the clear path through the first floor. As we came into the kitchen, I saw over their shoulders a horrified small furry black face, and Nuit leapt from the shelf where she was eating Naomi's food and bolted into the basement. One of the young men said wistfully that he loved cats. They were momentarily dismayed when I told them that the dishwasher had to go up to the second floor, but recovered and cheerfully went and got their straps and brought it up. The young man backing up the steps did in fact step right into the gap I'd made in the boxes. They could probably have gotten the dishwasher in anyway, but this made it very easy.
They put the new dishwasher down, remarking that it was probably the newest version of the old one, which looked superficially identical; then they loaded up the old one and took it away. I went down after them intending to offer a tip, but the supervisor was taking the dolly out and telling me that the casters for the dishwasher were inside it, and could I please fill out the survey Sears would send, and remember that no matter what the questions were about, all the ratings would accrue to the delivery people, so please don't downgrade them accidentally; and then she was gone while I was digging for my wallet. I hope they get paid well.
I spent the next two days restoring things to where they had been before I cleared a path for the delivery people. The moment I restored the cat tree to its place, Ninja leapt upon it and purred madly. I think there is still a half box of duplicate books in the sitting room that I need to transfer to a box that has not been chewed open by cats (yes, it was cats; no, I don't know why: maybe they wanted to read the Deryni books without anybody's noticing).
Last Sunday, when it was brutally hot, Eric and I had just brought Lydy's car home after running some very necessary errands. B, for Behemoth, has a perfectly good air conditioner, but it was not keeping up with the heat index at all. We had collapsed in the media room air conditioning with an attendant young black cat (Ninja, who is very fond of Eric) when my phone tweedled. Raphael had sent a simple message, "Dishwasher just died."
Four or five weeks ago, we had replaced the downstairs dishwasher, which was acquired in 1996 and served to wash all the dishes of the household until R and I got a second dishwasher for the upstairs. Sears said we got it in 2009, but that is not the case; it was more like 2004. Anyway, the downstairs dishwasher did not owe us any money. Around the time of its demise and replacement, the upstairs one started leaking. I got Sears to come out, and there was the usual discussion about whether we should fix or replace it. In addition to the leakage, which was fairly easily dealt with, the tops had snapped off a number of the uprights or pins or whatever they are called, the spaced spikes between which you put plates and so on. These were rusting happily away. The technician said that new racks, while available, were expensive, and we'd probably prefer to just get a new dishwasher if we couldn't stand the rusty racks. We decided to live with them a while longer, but the dishwasher had other plans. Raphael said that when started on that fateful Sunday, it had begun to fill, emitted a loud shrieking noise, and died so utterly that hitting the Cancel button did not cause the water to drain out. Raphael ended up bailing it, finally asking me if we had a turkey baster anywhere in the house -- we have two, though their usual purpose has been for me to squirt water onto French-style bread while it is baking. David uses a squirt bottle for that, when he makes Italian-style bread, but I find the turkey baster easier to aim.
Raphael usually cooks on Sunday, but was already dubious about this because of the weather. The inability to clear the kitchen of accumulated dirty dishes pretty much made the decision for us, and we ordered food from Szechuan Spice, which is excellent but pricy, and hence not much indulged in except to celebrate or to cope with an emergency.
Raphael did some hand-washing of glasses and flatware, and I managed over the next two days to make a pasta salad and later a mock egg salad and some tempeh bacon for sandwiches, in the interstices of the piled and waiting dishes.
Raphael, who does most of the dishwasher-related work upstairs, did some research, and we ordered a new dishwasher, not without a lot of financial trepidation, and Sears said it could be delivered Wednesday. We looked at the front staircase and thought, "Nope." The back staircase is fairly clear. I then looked at the back yard, which is gorgeous but not precisely passable. The sidewalk from the back door out to the garage is much too narrow, so that when I don't mow the daisy fleabane, Shasta daisies, dame's rocket, milkweed, and rudbeckia that find the yard more salubrious than the garden beds intended for their delectation, there is not much space to get by. I had at least, a few weeks earlier, severely pruned back the mock orange and its un-indicted co-conspirator the Virginia creeper, which were hitting in the face anybody rash enough to walk around the side of the garage to take out trash or recycling. But the rest of the yard still seemed unduly hazardous for people wrangling an appliance. I accordingly decided that the Sears people could bring the dishwasher through the first floor and then take it up the back stairs.
On Tuesday evening, we looked at the second-floor landing, and measured the available floor space. The dishwasher is 24 inches wide, and there was more than 24 inches of floor space. I eventually became agitated about the boxes stacked against the wall, and ended up, with some help from Raphael, moving them around and turning the longer ones sideways so that the width of the available floor was uniform. Then I actually got out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the staircase down to where I had already vacuumed and mopped upwards from the basement, the weekend before, for David's WAN party. I also finally, weeks after the stepladder came upstairs so the alarm-company guy could clean out the smoke alarm that was making the system call the central station and say there was a fire, got up on the stepladder, removed the horribly faint LED bulb that has been annoying everybody except David for months, and put in a somewhat alarming compact fluorescent bulb that would allow one to read fine print at any hour, should one wish to do so on a staircase. Then I took the stepladder back to the basement where it belongs, accompanied by a couple of cats for security purposes, or possibly just out of perversity. It was not a very hot day, but it was extremely humid, and I ended up having to turn on my office air conditioner just so that I could dry out.
On Wednesday I got up early (for me) and moved the cat tree, the litter box, a couple of containers with litter-scooping supplies, and a jug of litter off the back stairs and into the first floor. I had already cleared a path through the living and dining rooms and the downstairs kitchen. The litter box was so heavy that I had to partially scoop it before I could pick it up. The downstairs cats were interested, and felt that the hallway outside the bathroom was a perfectly cromulent location for their cat tree -- all but Ninja, who hung out forlornly on the landing where the cat tree had been. Then he got in my way when I decided that I needed to move a few more boxes into the upstairs to create an actual gap in the boxes just at the top of the stairs for a person backing up the steps with a dishwasher to step into before turning the dishwasher onto the landing. Cassie and Saffron helped from the other side by trying to escape downstairs.
Sears had sent an email with very detailed instructions about what householders needed to to and what delivery people would or would not do (NO LIFTING APPLIANCES OVER BANNISTERS OR OBSTACLES). They wanted domestic pets shut up, out of the delivery path. I had figured out an approach for this. For complicated historical reasons, I give the downstairs cats each a quarter can of wet food once a day, usually in the early afternoon. I give Arwen, Ninja, and Nuit their food in the media room, but Naomi, who is actually the intended beneficiary of the food, has to have hers up on a shelf lest either Arwen, who can't jump high, or Nuit, who can but doesn't feel the shelf is her property, eat Naomi's share. So I figured that when Sears called, I would give the three media room cats their food and shut the door on them, and just let Naomi eat as usual, because Naomi would have enough sense to vanish into the basement when she heard people tromping around in the front of the house.
The Sears people called to say they were ten minutes out. I washed out the cat bowls, filled them, and put three of them down in the media room, at which point I saw that Nuit was absent. Naomi, seeing a spare bowl, bolted into the media room and began to eat. I shut the door on the three of them and decided I'd just have to keep an eye out for Nuit. Then I rushed back upstairs and shut Cassie and Saffron into the front of the upstairs. They hang out there anyway, and fortunately had not conspired with Nuit to change their schedules too. The Sears people really did arrive in ten minutes. There was a supervisor, an efficient young woman who ten years ago would have had a clipboard, but who now had a cell phone whose battery was about to die. These are also very common among UPS and FedEx drivers. Technology is not quite keeping up somehow. Then two young men brought the dishwasher along on a dolly, praising the clear path through the first floor. As we came into the kitchen, I saw over their shoulders a horrified small furry black face, and Nuit leapt from the shelf where she was eating Naomi's food and bolted into the basement. One of the young men said wistfully that he loved cats. They were momentarily dismayed when I told them that the dishwasher had to go up to the second floor, but recovered and cheerfully went and got their straps and brought it up. The young man backing up the steps did in fact step right into the gap I'd made in the boxes. They could probably have gotten the dishwasher in anyway, but this made it very easy.
They put the new dishwasher down, remarking that it was probably the newest version of the old one, which looked superficially identical; then they loaded up the old one and took it away. I went down after them intending to offer a tip, but the supervisor was taking the dolly out and telling me that the casters for the dishwasher were inside it, and could I please fill out the survey Sears would send, and remember that no matter what the questions were about, all the ratings would accrue to the delivery people, so please don't downgrade them accidentally; and then she was gone while I was digging for my wallet. I hope they get paid well.
I spent the next two days restoring things to where they had been before I cleared a path for the delivery people. The moment I restored the cat tree to its place, Ninja leapt upon it and purred madly. I think there is still a half box of duplicate books in the sitting room that I need to transfer to a box that has not been chewed open by cats (yes, it was cats; no, I don't know why: maybe they wanted to read the Deryni books without anybody's noticing).