Reliance on appliance

Steve at WhitesCreek Journal has a busted dishwasher. The way he’s written the post, I’ve just totally spoilered it, but I think it’ll be alright.

He thinks the modern human cannot live without the dishwasher. Millions of Britons would disagree.

But they are, of course, in the wrong.

-0-

My in-laws are kind of anti-appliance. Well, they’re anti-convenience. I’ve joked with the Vol-in-Law that there’s the easy way, the hard way and then there’s his dad’s especially difficult way. Seriously, that man goes way out of his way to make his own life hard*.

But anyway, they don’t have a microwave, a dishwasher or a dryer. They don’t even have a hairdryer.

My father-in-law told me once that by the time you’ve unloaded and re-loaded the dishwasher you’ve spent just as much time as hand washing the dishes.

I asked him if he’d ever had a dishwasher. No. Well, then, I’ve lived with dishwashers and lived without them and I guarantee it takes less time than washing up by hand.

-0-

The Vol-in-Law doesn’t have his parents ideological opposition to labor saving devices, but he doesn’t have an American’s experience of them either. So it took me a while to convince him that we needed a dishwasher. Once we had one, he agreed that a dishwasher was a higher priority than a washing machine. When our dishwasher went bust last year, we wasted no time getting a new one. We probably should have spent a little more time, because the new one isn’t nearly as good as the old one.

And as for dryers…. I don’t really know why but he resisted that one for years. Years I tell you. Which was kinda dumb because he was the one who did the laundry. And like millions of Brits we had laundry hanging off radiators and drying racks in our living room and in our kitchen and goodness knows where all.

But once he had the dryer, he felt that his life was transformed. Transformed, I tell you, and we don’t even have a good set up. We don’t have room in our tiny house for a dryer, so we have it in the shed. But still what took him all day now takes him mere hours. And sometimes a lot less, because with the dryer I’m sometimes willing to do a load or two myself.

But now our dryer has had an accident. A stroller and extension ladder precariously stacked on top of the dryer fell off the other day, striking the door and causing it to be – and this is a technical term – wonky. So now it cuts out, unless you prop something against the door. (I’m thinking of rigging it with a bit of bungee cord). Until we figured it out, the dryer was suffering from a mysterious ailment. I was panicking about the dryer situation.

But the ViL, his view was starker. “Our whole way of life depends on a working dryer.”

___________
*Although my husband has given them the URL for my blog, I think my inlaws don’t read it. Though I would be so curious I wouldn’t be able to help myself. You know, to see if there were any posts like this one here, for example.

Welcome to the lame family

Today my husband said “Buddy*, I’m sorry we’ve brought you into such a lame family.”

And what prompted such an apology? Well, we’ve spent the whole day – both of us – looking for a very important piece of paper. Which we did not find.

What we did find:

• 8 year old adoption papers for our dead cat, which list her as male proving those surprise kittens really weren’t our fault
• 3 year adoption papers for our live cat
• the first ultrasounds of our baby which we lost before we could show anyone
• the plans to our dream home, which is a little less dreamy than the last time I saw it
• the lyrics to Rocky Top and Family Tradition and You Never Even Called Me by My Name that I handed out like hymn sheets at party I once threw.
• receipts from every time we’ve ordered pizza (wtf?)
• Instructions for our long dead, long-gone washer dryer
• Countless warranty registration certificates – partially completed
• a freedom of Budapest card
• a photocopy of a friend’s passport that he entrusted to us for safekeeping

Click thru for an even bigger picture of our ex-dream home

_____
*Yep, we often call him Buddy. Tis but one little redneck step up from Cletus, I guess.

UPDATE: we found it – it was our marriage certificate! I’m not pointing fingers, but I found it in area that someone else said he’d gone through with a fine toothed comb

Goodbye old friend

Our beloved coffee maker has given up the ghost. It’s just a filter drip thing, but it has a lot of nice features that we’ve grown used to, that we rely on:

• spring loaded valve thingy, so you can get a cheeky half cup before the brewing cycle has completed
• removable water tank, so you can take that to the sink and back – also so you’re not tempted to use the carafe which would introduce coffee to the innards of the machine
• thermos carafe – instead of the glass decanter with hot plate beneath – this means that your coffee never scorches.

It also has some other features, like a timer and strength modulator and I think you can reverse the polarity, but we don’t really use those. But the ones listed above, we need them now.

The pump on the machine has packed up, it’s caked with lime scale. London water is ridiculously hard, it’s well ‘ard. If you fink your appliances can escape unscaved, yer having a larf.

C’mon mister coffee, come and haff a go if you fink yer ‘ard enough. Yeah, you and yer coffee mate.

We’ve had a few close calls with the coffee maker – for a couple of years we had a paint brush stuck to the bottom of the carafe with blue tack because I’d broken the spring loaded valve thingy and without the extra height We nearly gave in and got rid of it a couple of times, just because we were tired of people asking “Why do you have a paint brush stuck to the bottom of your coffee pot?”. And yet we could hardly blame them for asking. But we persevered with our rigged appliance because we couldn’t find a replacement. The market is saturated now with one cup encapsulated coffee makers with their expensive tied brands of coffee or cappuccino-latte frothy extraordinaire jobbies which look complicated and difficult to clean and likely to cause steam burns and I don’t even like cappuccinos and lattes and poncy coffee drinks. Eventually the Vol-in-Law found, ordered and installed a part which allowed us to dispense with the brush.

But there’s no such easy cure this time. I’ve tried some home descaling methods – I’ve run three and a half bottles of vinegar and two doses of oxyclean through the thing. It’s improved the situation somewhat – since I’ve caught quite a bit of calcite grit coming through the machine, but it’s still not working right.

In the mean time we’ve been using a coffee press, which produces unsatisfactorily small amounts of coffee which goes cold all too quickly. And on Thursday we bought a filter drip machine for such a cheap price that we can view the machine as disposable (it cost the same as two and a quarter venti Americanos). And the taste? We probably should have spent the money on the two and a quarter coffee shop coffees.

I’ve identified a replacement coffee maker that has all the features of our old one – plus a descaling mode, but we’d have to take a second mortgage out. But we’re getting desperate. Might be time for a call to the banker.

Postal strike

We haven’t had any mail for the past couple of weeks. Nothing. Not a bill, not a postcard from a vacationing pal (not that we get those anymore), no gardening catalogs or the bizarre mailings (mostly Scientology, psychic fairs and woodland preservation) addressed to the previous residents of our house. Nothing.

There’s been a postal strike, you see. And though theoretically there has been some post coming through in some parts of the country in the breaks between strike days, we’ve had nothing. But now the strike is off, apparently.

But still no post. Until today. After two weeks, we got an American Express bill and some cultist mailing to a previous resident of our house.

Before and after

An expectant blogger mom has pretty much finished her nursery – all bar the finishing touches and, well – the baby. And it’s all pretty darn impressive.

I have to say it makes me feel a little like an underachiever. It pretty much looks like it’s out of a book and their before was a gutted attic, so many would be hard pressed to do that much. But we’re a long, long way off that.

Ol’ Cletus hit the 8 week mark on Sunday and our “nursery” looks a lot more like a before than an after. I’m not a home decorating guru, so I set the bar reasonably and realistically low on our nursery standards and we haven’t even met that. For example I was asked:

What color are you going to paint the nursery?

I was just thinking of leaving the walls the original off-white. I like off white – it’s the best pallet for the imagination. But I will get some spray cleaner and wipe off those random marks on the wall and I might clean the kitty nose prints off the window.

Progress update: strange black marks and kitty nose prints still intact. On the other hand, we did manage to clear a shelf for all of Cletus’s new clothes. And now instead of a random pile of law books and novels on top of the dresser there’s a random pile of baby stuff. And for us, that’s a big, big deal.

We don’t even have a crib set up. It’s still propped in pieces behind a chair in our living room. Thank goodness we planned on co-sleeping.

Fastest milk cart in the [South] West

A reader asks:

Is it fun having a milkman?

Well, it’s not exactly like this. But it’s still pretty cool. I’d resisted getting milk delivered to our door, as it costs nearly twice as much as buying milk at the store. On the other hand, popping in for milk at the local Sainsbury’s always results in additional impulse purchases – so maybe overall it saves us money. And the milk, delivered in glass bottles, is not only environmentally friendly (as the glass bottles are reused) but tastes better, too.

This morning it seemed extra fun – because we got a free sample pint bottle of chocolate milk. A near sinful and unneccessary frivolity – but tasty and delicious all the same. The Vol-in-Law informed me that we could have it delivered every fortnight – meaning it wouldn’t be quite so decadent as frequent delivery. I’m thinking about it.

-0-

I’ve always had a slight fear of glass milk bottles. A little boy who lived on First Street in Lawrenceburg when and where VolMom was growing up, ran out of his house one morning and fell on the glass milk bottles and freakishly cut a major blood vessel and bled to death. This is the dark side of milk delivery. I heard this story several times in my early impressionable years, but no doubt it left a deepr impression still on VolMom – who had known the little boy. VolMom greatly enjoyed our delivered milk – but when the taxi came to take her off to Heathrow for the flight back to America – she pointed to the assembled empies by our front door.

“Did I ever tell you about…?” she started.

“Yes, you did,” I replied.

t-13: projects to pass the time

I’ve been a bit bored and antsy today. It’s a holiday, but the Vol-in-Law had arranged to meet a student. I’ve been wanting a needle point project. Something to do to occupy my hands while I watch tv and wait. But when I looked about a month ago, the only ones I liked cost around £50 ($100) – and I didn’t like them that much. I also looked in a cheaper place near my house, but everything was a bit twee and tacky. I was starting to think of going back to the £50 middle class needlepoint store. But I didn’t want to venture into town on the Underground on my own this close to my due date.

Then I remembered that I had an unfinished needlepoint project in our “craft cupboard” in the room that used to be our office.

Our house is very small. It’s a little terraced house, in the middle of the street. We have two bedrooms, both small, but one smaller than the other. This second smaller bedroom is where we used to have our computer and office equipment and a lotta, lotta books. Plus a closet full of junk that we’ve moved from house to house in over ten years of living together. You know, old photos, craft stuff, window envelopes I took from a temping job. We called it the craft cupboard, because when we first moved into the house I had a neatly organised shelf for paints, brushes, and various textile projects.

We’d moved the PC downstairs a couple of weeks ago but we hadn’t quite cleared out the room completey to make room for baby and all his stuff. And we certainly hadn’t touched that closet of horrors. It’s so bad now, that when I take something out I have to get help to stuff things back in. But I wanted that needlepoint project, so I bit the bullet and started pulling things out.

I found it, and in the process I managed to throw away some stuff. Not enough, I didn’t manage to clear any actual shelves. I mostly threw out faulty PC equipment and old plastic bags. Oh, and a clothing labelling kit from when the Vol-in-Law went to boarding school, in the 80s.

Both of us are pack rats, I admit, but we are each deeply suspicious of the value of each other’s stuff and probably over estimate the amount of the other person’s stuff. The ViL has more than me, because this is his country. In fact, one day boxes and boxes of his childhood stuff arrived at our house, sent by my in-laws – whom I could have killed. They have two houses and were in fact still storing their other child who was over 30 at the time. I thought if they had room for her and all her stuff, surely they could have spared me his last remaining boxes of crap.

Anyway, the ViL asked me if I had thrown away any of his stuff – and I said that I had only thrown away mutual items and things I knew to be trash. But he starts poking through the bag and says “You’re throwing away that fabric pen?! I’ve had it since I was 12.”

13 days til baby Cletus – and we have at least until he starts crawling before we have to clean out that closet, right?

interior design considerations

Genderist and her husband are picking out the details for their new home. She’s designing a fantasy ambience of Volunteer expatica.

The best news is that we found some authentic Tennessee river rock to use in the master bathroom as a snazzy updo for the tile. Everyday when I’m in the shower it’ll be like I’m a little bit closer to home. We made positively sure that there would be no Alabama river rock included by mistake. They understand the gravity of that mistake; it would be a deal-breaker. Showering with Alabama just wouldn’t be the same, and you’d probably stink more when you got out of the shower than before you stepped inside.

Indeed.

weekend

Purple crocus in my garden

We had an anti-social weekend – and spent the whole time cleaning or delivering political leaflets.

In our down time, I don’t know what the Vol-in-Law did, but I worked on my photo book of our vacation in France. I think I’ve nearly finished – except for the proofing. Regular readers of this blog may doubt my ability to proof – riddled as my posts are with typos, transatlantic misspellings, homophonic offenses and lazy sentence construction.