The Other Shoe Dropped

I’m not a pessimist, more of a pragmatist. For instance, I knew that after two days in a row where I’d won two things – BACKSTREET SAINTS, a book I’d really, really wanted and an out-of-the-blue new banner design for my blog from the uber-cool design service Tekeme Studios, that a shoe was about to drop.

I just had no idea it would drop in a puddle.

Friday night, I went straight from work to get The Kiddo's hair cut and then to her VBS commencement service. We got home late, and we headed, pretty much, straight for bed.

The next morning, I sleep-walked myself into the kitchen with the intentions of putting on tea for me and grits for The Husband. But as I trudged in sock-clad feet across my kitchen floor, a ridge caught my foot.

A ridge that hadn’t been there the morning before.

I have laminate flooring in my kitchen, and I’ve loved it. Sure, I’ve been a water-nazi about spills, but even the few accidents we’ve had have created no problems. So at first, I thought someone had spilled water and let it soak into the flooring.

But then I saw a whole mountain range of ridges.

My heart sank. I traced the ridges back to its foothills … the dishwasher. Unscrewing the bottom plate and pretzeling myself to a vantage point, I saw a puddle of water under the machine’s guts.

The culprit had been found. And since it had been in that hole from 1994, if we pulled that sucker out, it was not going back in. Nope, it was time to find a new dishwasher.

That was easier said than done. I spent Saturday with my poor sister, trying to find a store that (a) had a dishwasher I could afford and (b) had a dishwasher that was in stock. One store clerk told me that I could order one. I asked when the dishwasher would be in.

“Oh, seven to ten days, and that’s to the store. Delivery to your home would have to be arranged once it got here.”

I couldn’t wait a week on a dishwasher – that old one had to come out post haste, and I had no cut-off valve to the dishwasher. So that meant I had to plug the end of the line with something.

I won’t bore you with the catastrophes that we ran into – wrong fittings, leaky pipes, a soldered-in cut-off valve to the hot water tank that suddenly sprang a geyser when we went to close it off. Suffice it to say that I got the new dishwasher loaded and running at about 10:30 that night. And the only way we got it to work was a coalition of the talent and brains of my dad and my sister, with limited help from The Husband and me. Because plumbing? It is so not my thing.