¡Marianísima!

Since I’m still/once again aiming to get out of the basement, I decided I need some number-specific goals. Here we go, in order:

• Weigh less than a male Olympic water polo player
• Ride in a hot air balloon without paying the fatty surcharge
• Weigh less than my husband (tricky because as I start losing, so will he, making this a moving finish line)
• Lose an Olivia’s worth of weight (Yes, my slim goddaughter is growing, making this another moving target, but truth is I could stand to lose an Olivia-plus-brother.)
• Weigh less than my nephew (He’s growing, so as I lose and he gains, we may meet somewhere in the middle, hopefully an ideal middle for both of us!)

Like how I announced my number-specific goals without any numbers? I’m tricky (or maybe just neurotic).

What’s your goal?

Figures that the first art I buy and actually frame for our house is food-related. For years, I’ve searched for old-school butcher posters identifying cuts of meat. I don’t remember if I first saw one in a book or on TV, but I remember thinking it would be a cute decoration for a kitchen.

Little did I know how difficult it would be to find one that wasn’t ugly. (I suppose trying to find a cute poster about slaughtering animals is a little ridiculous.) Then a few weekends ago, at San Francisco’s Renegade Craft Fair, I walked up to a booth with these:

crappy cell phone photo

I think I squealed! My friend Jenny came over to see what the excitement was, and said, “You’ve been looking for those for like three years.” Yes, yes, I have. Sold to the woman on a mission!

What could be better than meaty art for my  kitchen? Art from a local artist! Even better than that? The prints came in tubes labeled “Moo,” “Oink,” and “Baa!” My husband moos at all animals (and it’s contagious), so it’s perfect that our first hanging art is titled “Moo.”

PS – Note there is no picture of said art actually hanging, because our kitchen is ugly. See Dishwasher Diaries 1 & 2. It’s like pearls on a swine (where the pearls ARE a swine, and the swine is our kitchen).

Sometimes, I love buying gifts. Finding that perfect something makes me giddy. Other times, I am filled with dread. What can I get the person who has everything he needs or wants? How can I surprise him?

My husband is such a person. It’s not that he’s picky. He possesses that lethal combination: disposable income plus penchant for internet shopping. This means, once he thinks of something he “needs,” he goes off and gets it. I have to be quick or I have to be clever.

With his birthday arriving, I panicked. He’s got hobbies aplenty, but I’m not going to buy more electronics, more drums, more cookbooks, or more gardening equipment. What’s a gal to do?

Meet Zeke. The gift for the gardener who has everything, because surely he doesn’t have a gardener zombie.

Mmmm….mint. Nom nom nom.

I recently shredded a piece of my past. While cleaning out a box full of outdated papers, cards, and scribbled notes, I found old employment reviews. I considered filing them. Instead, I shredded them. While the shredder chewed and spit out the pages, I wondered if it was a form of denial to destroy the documents that outlined all the ways in which I was not an ideal employee. Was I shredding them to erase the negativity? No, I shredded them because they’re no longer relevant. I don’t plan to return to fundraising, and even if I did, I wouldn’t hand a potential employer my performance reviews.

I’m having a harder time with old journals. Part of me desperately wants to shred them; the packrat-writer part feels compelled to keep them. I’ve had this internal debate for decades, probably. In fact, I had a journal my senior year of high school that I threw in the trash. Years later, while looking for something in my parents’ house, I found my old journal. My mom had fished it from the trash. I was simultaneously angry, horrified, embarrassed. I feared she’d read it. A friend said, “No offense, but she probably got bored with it.”

It’s like a fairy tale. Sweet & inviting bear, beckoning you to sit down and read. But watch out! He’ll cut you.

Yesterday, I decided to read it again. I would love to say my teenage journal is exciting, riveting. It’s not. It’s boring, filled with the minutiae of a high school senior – going to the mall, liking boys, dreaming about the prom. If it were just boring, that would be fine. But instead, it’s laced with doses of teenage angst, the worst being “I’m getting down on myself, feeling I’m too fat. I think maybe that’s why guys don’t like me – I’m too ugly.”

I vacillated between longing for connection and worrying about getting labeled a slut. How could I have worried about being called a slut when I’d only kissed a couple boys? Where did all my loathing come from? I wrote about a sweet grandfatherly gentleman I worked with who asked me “if all the guys were deaf, dumb, and blind” when I told him I didn’t have a boyfriend. I wish there were more Mr. Prindevilles in my life, and that I’d really heard them.

In the middle of this journal, pages were torn out. If I left all the anguish and doubt, what the hell did I rip out?

The problem with my journals is I only wrote when things were really good or really bad, thus they’re like manic-depressive roller coasters.

I’ve read this journal and now re-read it at least once. All it does it make me sad. That sadness is no longer relevant to my life. It’s going back in the trash, where it should have stayed in the first place.

A friend and I made a pact that if one dies, the other would take her journals and dispose of them. I’m going to save her the effort.

Sometimes, when you see a person running you think, “Wow, she looks like she was born to do that,” or “So graceful. He looks like he’s floating.” Runners are often likened to gazelles.

Me? Not so much! Today as I was heaving and panting my way through the backstreets (no main streets!) of my neighborhood, I felt as un-gazelle like as possible. Me? I run like a hippo.

Between asthmatic gasps, I thought: Huh, maybe it’s not so bad to run like a hippo. Sure, they’re large and maybe lumbering. Yet despite spending a majority of their days frolicking in the water, they’re fierce! They’ll kill people who come between them and the water. Plus, they run faster than I’ll ever run, faster than any human – 14 miles an hour.

Gazelles? They run because they’re always getting attacked. They run in herds. That’s not cool at all. A group of hippos, on the other hand, is a bloat. Or a pod. Or a siege. My next running team is going to be called The Hippo Siege. We’ll be badass, just like hippos.

Sure a gazelle is graceful, lithe, and balletic. I will never be any those things. Nobody will ever stop to admire me as I run down the street. (And, seriously, I need put “run” in quotes.) As if they’d seen a fearsome hippo, they’ll avert eye contact and get out of my way. Rock on!

On Thursday, the new installation company was scheduled to install our dishwasher. I was upstairs in my office when the doorbell rang.

I opened the door and laughed when I saw the same guys from the previous week. Evidently, “different installation company” is the same one that contracts out to BestBuy. Cue Three’s Company theme song, because it doesn’t get more farcical than that. And really, our landlord’s a younger, cheaper Stanley Roper.

In true Mr. Roper fashion, our landlord once again turned to CraigsList when our refrigerator died a painful, messy death (while dishwasher was still in middle of the floor). New one came literally on the back of a truck, half hanging off its lowered tailgate. It worked, but I think a smoker lived inside the refrigerator, because it stank. We aired it out, cleaned it out, used baking soda, and finally Smells BeGone. I swear, it’s called Smells BeGone. And it works!

Disasters tend to come in threes, and we’ve had dishwasher, fridge. What’s next? I’m hoping the first dishwasher death counts as number one, because then we’re set. Until the next big earthquake, that is. When the earthquake hits, I’m running to the street, because this house is coming down!

When the dishwasher guy takes one look at your kitchen setup and mimes shooting himself in the head, it’s not a good start. Things did not progress from there. Unfortunately, that’s not the beginning of the story. This was Dishwasher 2. The first died on Feb 26. When we emailed landlord, he wrote, “Darn, that’s the second dishwasher that house has eaten.” A little bit later, he wrote, “Good news. Found a replacement dishwasher on CraigsList for $80.” Maybe we don’t have a dishwasher-hungry house, after all.

Whaddya mean, not up to code?

The landlord asked us to pick up and install the dishwasher. Derek refused the first but gamely agreed to latter. Clean dishes and happiness until April 25 when the second dishwasher broke. Derek emailed landlord, pre-emptively suggesting he buy a new dishwasher. Landlord queried again, “Can you pick it up and install it?”

At this point, I screamed, “No! You are not allowed to do any of it. That is his job. He can do it himself, or pay to get it done.” Derek politely declined set up, and landlord replied, “No big deal, I can do it.” That’s before we went on vacation for two weeks, and returned home to old, broken dishwasher. Six weeks after dishwasher death 2, the installation guys were in our house, scowling at the dated kitchen.

The repair guy opened the cabinet below the sink and shook his head, asking where the connection was. Luckily, he wasn’t fat, because he had to slide into “Harry Potter’s closet.”

I have to shimmy in sideways

He squeezed in and back out, again shaking his head. “We can’t install your dishwasher.” Evidently our kludge of a kitchen isn’t up to code. (We’d guessed as much.) Then he asked, “Where’s your water heater? There may be a workaround.”

“In the basement.”

“Basement? Where are the stairs?”

“There are no stairs. There’s a ladder.” I pulled the trap door open, and he exclaimed, “That’s a dungeon.” But he gamely climbed down. His assistant should’ve said, “It puts the lotion on its skin…”

“I promise it’s safe. Built by an engineer!”

From above, I directed them to the lights, and repair guy calls to his assistant on the ladder, “There are grow lights down here!”

“For tomatoes,” I clarify.

“Sure. Whatever. I don’t care.”

“No, really, for tomatoes.”

“I’ve seen it all. Went to a penthouse office suite, and the guy greeted me totally stoned.” Derek later told me I’d sent repair guy into basement for naught, because it’s the furnace in the basement, not the hot water heater (let’s hope we don’t still live here when the furnace needs replacing, because that’ll be a colossal pain in the ass). But after looking at the basement, repair guy said he can do some re-routing of pipes and plumber magic.

I called my landlord, who ultimately told me, “They’re crazy. It’s not that hard to install. I’ll just do it.” In other words, he declined their immediate service to avoid paying the $130. Yes, that’s $130 for an engineer/land baron – one who obviously doesn’t highly value his time, since just his drive to and from our house will take 1.5 hours.

And so, today…7 weeks without dishwasher, landlord came to do the install. I left with high hopes. I returned to see an old dishwasher in the driveway, and a new dishwasher…

in the middle of the kitchen! A note attached read, “installation was beyond my mechanical abilities. Called new installation company.” Allegedly, they’re coming in two days.

I seriously hope it costs more than $130.

Even more than that, I long for the day when I can get clean dishes with the press of a button.