My four and a half hour test yesterday was a real brain drain and left me worn thin the rest of the day. Which is why I wasn’t so happy to come home and find, A)our old dishwasher sitting in the front yard, B)our new dishwasher dented and scratched and sitting loose and unconnected in the base cabinet, and C)a note from the plumber asking me to call him. Turns out he had some questions and tried calling me but had the wrong number, so he left without finishing the job. That’s funny! It turns out there’s a little technological advance called caller ID, where you can see that a client has called you a dozen times over the last three weeks to get you to finish the job. Hee hee ha ha!! My ribs are cracking from the strain of laughing!
I think the home improvement gods hear me complain about going in the crawlspace, which is why I found myself on all fours in the cold mud last night, shimming up the dishwasher. It was so much fun, I would be happy to go down there again for any reason. [do you hear me, repair gods? DO YOU?!]
[deep breath] I am sure it will all be worked out today. And again I am reminded that past behavior is an excellent forecast of future behavior. The first three times this plumber didn’t show up, or came and didn’t do work, I should have pulled the plug. Forewarned is forearmed, and now I’d like to swing my forearm at…well, I’d better stop. It has taken three weeks and over seven hundred dollars, and we’ve seen a quantum improvement from an old dishwasher that worked until the line clogged, to a new and dented dishwasher that will work until something goes wrong with it. Hooray home ownership!
It seems that every year there is a “perfect storm” convergence of stressful things: work deadlines, tests and studying, home improvement disasters. This year I’m going to beat the odds and not get sick because of it. And I will somehow muster the energy to finish painting the bedroom so I can close the book on the mold remediation project. I’m crossing my fingers I get that done before something else goes wrong.
Oh! I forgot the punctuation mark on the day yesterday. Amidst all this, I was setting the dinner table and stood up suddenly. My head smacked into the chandelier and knocked loose candles and glass bobeches, which crashed to the floor and sent shards of glass all over the room and into the Christmas tree. But I’m not worried. Baby Harbat’s bare feet will find that broken glass soon enough. Just like the neighborhood kids always find the razor blades I put in our Halloween apples. Ha ha hee hee, just kidding everyone! Merry Christmas!
I’ve got another professional exam tomorrow. This one involves, conservatively, ten thousand pages of details and codes, plus graphical vignettes to be solved. Mostly the studying has been fun, but it’s left precious little time for fun things, including blogging. Tomorrow I’ll be doing my brain dump and won’t post, but Friday will be back in full force! Thursday is also the scheduled day for the plumber to arrive, which means you can look forward to a Friday blog post full of brisk and vigorous language about what went wrong and why we still don’t have a working dishwasher.
I was up at 2 this morning, then again at 3. Not because I was so excited for Tuesday to start that I couldn’t sleep. Apparently, though, Baby Harbat was. She was cry-whining and when I went in to her room, she sounded surprisingly awake. I put her back to sleep and she was up again in a half hour. I am not good at this time of night, especially when I’m dreaming that I am a paraplegic and crawling through debris-clogged storm sewers on a college campus (yes, really). By 3:30 I relented and brought her to sleep with us. For the first ten minutes she was calm and I was just sinking to sleep when she started squirming. And talking. And grabbing my ears. By four-thirty my wife and I had given up on sleep. By five BH was back in her bed and asleep. Then morning came and I was cross.
But it gave me plenty of time to think about today’s blog
entry. Last night while washing dishes I
put on an album I haven’t listened to for a few years. It’s Emma
Kirkby singing sacred music by Pergolesi.
Obscure? Yes. Beautiful? Absolutely.
Can I ask myself another question I’ll answer? Since it’s my blog and I can do what I want…yes. I came
across Emma Kirkby on a recommendation from an opera singer who said Emma had
the most beautiful and clear voice of anyone she’d ever heard. Straight from the horse’s mouth.
One of the things I like is that she lets the quality of her voice shine through in sustained notes, rather than warbling through music with excessive vibrato. This is one of my pet peeves about singers—rather than letting us really hear their voice, they warble and tremolo until it makes you think the recording studio was in the midst of a massive seismic event. Look, if I want to view the Mona Lisa, I want to look at it hanging on the wall, not through binoculars from a bouncing car. When I listen to a vocalist, I expect to hear a voice, not a theremin. That said, listen to the incredible sound of Emma Kirkby’s voice on this track. She starts at 0:45 if you’re impatient, but the whole track is worth three and a half minutes of your day. Listen to her voice soar at 2:09.
And because I’m feeling magnanimous, or maybe just loopy from lack of sleep, here’s another track with Ms. Kirkby. For the highlight go to 3:28. She sings straight through for 20 seconds in a climbing crescendo that words don’t do justice. Enjoy.
Our lawn, that is. From the recent rains, all dormant seeds in our lawn have sprouted up. This has taken two days, an astonishing genesis of life from the dusty dirt of the lawn. I am pleased to see things growing, but wife is worried about the additional work to till this under when we landscape the yard. Well, as that project is coming in the indeterminate future and erosion happens today, I’m glad to have living groundcover. Green is good.
This weekend saw the failure of another item in our kitchen. An appliance? Not quite—a cookie sheet. Such a simple thing, you gasp, how could it go bad. I wondered the same thing. It’s an ubiquitous non-stick cookie sheet that has somehow become pro-stick. I made toffee and shortbread this weekend, both of which have butter as the primary ingredient. This means it’ll never stick to any surface due to the oily buttery goodness, yet somehow the cookie sheet held tight. I ended up shattering four shortbreads trying to scrape them off the pan. Even the toffee stuck, which led me to say, “So long mutha-f#@ah!” and walk the pan out to the trashcan for unceremonial disposal. I have little patience for equipment failures and when it compromises baked goods, I unpack the four-letter words.
Despite the Cookie Sheet Debacle, the weekend was mostly a great success. I managed to get many household projects done including, hold your applause please, the mold remediation painting. My wife is going to put on the finish coat this week while I lie in bed and eat bon bons. I also put up 120 feet of holiday lights on the fence. Now all we need is the kicking cowboy sign from Vegas and we’ll be the envy of the neighborhood. Other miscellaneous tasks including gluing down the entry door sweep, reattaching the rear gate latch, reattaching a fence rail that came loose due to another $#@! equipment failure (10-year outdoor screws that fell short of their promise by nine years and ten months), and finding my wife’s boots buried in a horrifying mess of boxes in the garage. Total success!
This week I have to decide if I’m going to buy another 100 lbs of flour. Do I want to commit to more baking and evening projects? I admit I’m a sucker for change, and unless I keep updating my menu, I’ll get bored cranking out the same breads for customers week after week. Since Thanksgiving I’ve made very little bread, and have enjoyed nights off from the kitchen. Maybe my New Year’s resolution will be to update the entire menu and branch out with new breads. Should I do the walnut goat cheese pumpernickel first or maybe an asiago sage sourdough? I’ve still got my apple moonshine fermenting in the fridge—maybe it’s time to start up the drunken fruit breads. Or just drink the whole bottle and go blind. That’s an option.
It is the holiday season, which means you will be surrounded
by food all day and night. In our office
there’s a constant flow of sugary nom-noms to the kitchen table, given by
clients and consultants. Because I run
twice a week I think I’m allowed entitled to eat these things. If, by the end of the day, I don’t want
dessert after dinner, I know I’ve had too much.
Today I’ll try to be better.
Sure. So far I’ve only had chai,
caramel popcorn, and chocolates. Really
that’s not SO bad.
It now looks like our dishwasher won’t be done until the middle or end of next week. Considering the 45-minute dishwashathon I endured last night, I’m not pleased about this. I’m not sure what’s worse: having the old dishwasher still in place but unusable, or having our new dishwasher sitting in its packaging in the dining room, also unusable. Considering that we’ve got the old stove and hot water tank in the garage awaiting disposal, that makes three full-size appliances taking up space. Maybe I should put my car up on cinder blocks in the front yard, throw a blue plastic tarp over some big piles of trash, and get a pit bull on a chain. Junkyard’s open, y’all!
After Bread Week, I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from baking. But that’ll all change over Christmas. We’re going up north to my sister’s house for a family reunion/holiday. I’m already planning out which breads I want to bake and what ingredients will be needed for each. It’ll be odd to A)bake at high altitude, B)bake with unfamiliar tools in an unfamiliar kitchen, C)not get paid for my work. Just kidding. I will be charging full price. So far my ingredient list is fairly simple. The only thing I’ll take with me is a small stash of sourdough starter. If it survives the flight and freezing temperatures I should be okay. I would carry it with me on the plane but the TSA might have issue with it. If it’s less than 3 oz and smells like sourdough, is it okay? Because that means I could take my running socks too. Hey-O! Happy Friday!
When I was in elementary school, the class picture day was excitement. First, we were deviating from the normal schedule, which is always good. Black plastic combs were handed out, with the ridiculous assumption that kids would comb their own hair, rather than flick each other in the ear or use it as a rubber band launcher. Then you’d try to smile and seem natural while sitting in front of the blue-blob or brown-blob (fall version) backdrop while a line of a hundred kids watched you tilt your head an inch to the right, then place your hands one over the other like Lord Fauntleroy. It’s a wonder my parents ever got a normal picture.
Yesterday we got Baby Harbat’s school pictures. I don’t know how the photographer got her to sit still and pose so well—there were three different shots in there. We looked through the pictures with her last night, and came to a sheet that had all her teachers and the other kids in her class. One by one she pointed at each and said their name. I was blown away. Of course she already has a big vocabulary, which includes plenty I can’t understand, but this was truly amazing. It shouldn’t be surprising, since she sees these kids every day, but it was that I didn’t know who they all were. [wipes tear] They grow up so fast!
Now onto the most funnest super-fantabulous part of the day, dishwasher mayhem! We got two more quotes from plumbers after the first guy went AWOL. Each of those was several hundred dollars more. I had a third quote that was roughly the same price, so I had them go over today to do the work. Finally, finally we would have our dishwasher installed. I felt like Wile E. Coyote finally catching the Roadrunner. But no. The new plumber said that once he saw the work, it would be several hundred more than he thought, putting the quote at the highest amount yet. So he’s going home, now the fifth plumber to come to our house and leave without performing work. YAY! I’M SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW!
It is cold* here, finally. Since I’m an East Coast transplant, I expect biting winds and miserable conditions from October through March. Didn’t say I liked them, I just expect them. But when I’m in a t-shirt and shorts in December, I think something’s a bit off. Which is why I’m glad a big storm blew through here dumping rain, overturning trees, and leaving fresh cold in its wake. It makes a fire in the fireplace more practical than when it’s in the 70s outside.
I imagine all my loyal readers have been on the edge of their seats since Friday, wringing their hands and fretting over the dishwasher situation. [drumroll] Still nothing! Our plumber went into radio silence on Monday despite an appointment, then didn’t return calls on Tuesday, so I’m assuming he won the lottery and is drinking mojitos poolside in Antigua right now. Which means our brand new dishwasher is still sitting in our dining room, jostling for space with the Christmas tree. I should add I haven’t received my 24k gold toilet, so it’s been a rough week. It’s funny how time is so flexible when it comes to making appointments, and so rigid when the bill is due.
I ran out of flour this weekend, marking the 200lb milestone for flour. It’s actually more than that since it doesn’t include whole wheat and the 5lb bags I was buying before bulk. I’m proud to have made that much bread, and this weekend I realized I can make a damn fine loaf of sourdough. This time I didn’t do an overnight ferment of the formed loaf, and I’ve been keeping my starter at 100% hydration and much more active. I think I made my best bread yet, a sourdough batard with real sour flavor, golden bubbly crust, and chewy crumb. It seems the extra night in the fridge lets the culture break down much more starch into sugars, which results in a very dark crust. I think for a daily bread, I actually prefer the lighter gold crust. I still haven’t picked out which new recipe I’m going to try, but I’m enjoying the lull in baking after Bread Week, so there’s no rush.
By the end of the week, I expect the dishwasher to still be in our dining room. Like bringing an umbrella to prevent rain, I’m hoping this reverse psychology will work, and I won’t be hand-washing dishes any more. Yeah.
*This is San Diego, after all, so cold means it’s in the 40s in the morning and 50s to 60 during the day. That’s cold enough for me.
I had a great weekend, thanks for asking. Despite the snafus on Friday, Saturday was my wife’s final birthday present, a full day to go out with friends, shop, and basically do what she wanted without a husband or child breathing down her neck. Baby Harbat and I spent the day playing together. In the morning we went with a friend to pick up Christmas trees. BH and her friend ran at full speed through Home Depot, laughing and making unpredictable turns, whizzing past amused shoppers and narrowly missing carts loaded with sharp-edged lumber. Getting two little girls and two Christmas trees in, and on, the car was no small feat. But once we lashed the girls to the roof and buckled the trees into the carseats, it was smooth sailing.
In the afternoon BH and I made Scottish shortbread from an old family recipe. She took her first bite of dough, a smile spread across her face and she said, “I LIKE that!” She helped me decorate and bake it, then the King and Princess of Casa Soutowood decreed that Shortbread is Delicious. Later on, I made a fire in the fireplace and she helped me blow on the embers to stoke it up, her little cheeks puffing with earnestness. At one point before dinner she rummaged through the DVDs saying, “Miss Julie? Miss Julie?” When I picked up the Sound of Music DVD, she screamed with delight. Somehow she knew Julie Andrews’ name, and was delighted to watch the first half hour of the movie, asking me, “Where’s Miss Julie?” each time Julie was off screen.
Then came dinner. Mind you, I was in a great mood having spent a fantastic and tantrum-free day with my daughter. I made her fried tofu and she ate most of it, then began Evening Flailing. This is an activity that involves thrashing her arms from side to side in an attempt to bring everything around her to ruination. It works surprisingly well, clearing a table of food, dishes, magazines, placemats. In seconds she’d applied soy sauce and tofu to every surface in the kitchen, and spit food on me. And just like that my love turned to boiling point frustration. That was when my wife came home and took over. I checked in on them during reading time and BH was back in adorable mode, and I gave her hugs and kisses before bed.
This is what it’s like to have a toddler. You love them with all your heart and in the same moment are ready to put your head through a wall from frustration. Then you’re back to heart-bursting love. As a child’s emotions run like a steep-pitched roller coaster, so must you ride along with them.
Sunday was the day to decorate the tree, which meant BH found a little paper gift bag and proceeded to pack it full of teddy bear ornaments. Our requests to help decorate the tree were met with her favorite phrase, “No no no!” She took her paper bag of bears to bed with her, and to school this morning as well. The tree is still bare of ornaments. See what I did there? Ahhhhh….good times.
Dandy, dandy start to the day. I get up early to be ready for an office-wide breakfast at 7. Just about to get on the highway and see I’m out of gas. Fine, I drive down another block to a gas station. Sit at the light for three cycles until I realize the turn arrow won’t ever turn green, so I go through the red.
Wait! You think you know what’s going to happen…but you don’t! I pull into the station and pull the little electrical switch to open the gas filler flap. When I walk around to the side, it’s still locked tight. This has happened once before. At the time, it took me 10 minutes and somehow it opened. Also at the time I thought, “I should get this fixed.” This morning I was forced to do just that. The door didn’t open and I drove to the dealership on fumes, twiddled my thumbs until a serviceman appeared from his well-heated booth, and was told there’d be a $102 diagnostic charge. And my extended warranty had already run out. Awesome!
Then I walked back home, which was also AWESOME, since it was in the 40s and I have full-bore case of bronchitis. And my hair was wet. Great!
I got to the office and nobody was there, since they were out having breakfast. I got to eat my lunch for breakfast and begin my day. And I got to tell the plumber that I’d measured the dishwasher and the opening, and they WOULD be able to get it installed. It wouldn’t be easy, or fun, but it could be done. He said he might be able to come back today to do the job. Which is funny since he left yesterday without doing any of the other work necessary to install the new unit, like capping off the old plumbing, installing new waste and water lines. When I say funny I mean it puts me in a mood like this:
By the end of the day, I expect to have a working car, an installed and running dishwasher, and a toilet made of 24-karat gold. I will settle for two of three.
Ah, the joys of an older home. Is the standard for 36” counters? The old house will have 34. If the standard is 34, your house is 32.
Today’s chapter in the dishwasher saga involves the title’s ½ inch. The plumber came by and gave us what my wife said are the four words you don’t want to hear: “We have a problem.” Turns out our new dishwasher won’t fit. The space is 33 ½” and we have a 34” dishwasher. If I was doing the job, I’d take the electric sander to the dishwasher, floor, and counter until that half inch was gone. I haven’t been home to check it for myself, but the plumber confirms there’s no way to make it happen. So we need to box up and return our new dishwasher, get it back to the store somehow, and buy another one. I imagine the only company making 33 ½” dishwashers is based out of New Zealand and is willing to sell us one for the low price of four thousand dollars (shipping extra).
So instead of coming home to a newly installed and running dishwasher, I’ll come home to a new conundrum. Oh, and that painting project in the bathroom and bedroom still isn’t done yet. Dishes first, then painted walls. Gotta have the priorities straight.
