Okay, so where was I?

Oh yeah! The Further Adventures of Life Along the Pinchgut, in which we find out that our hero is a Pathetic, Whipped, Knuckle-Dragging Moron, AGAIN! With other rude and disgusting stories of Earthworms, Turkey, Large Resin Angels, Tools, Rubber Hoses, The Infinite Variety of Cornbread Dressings, Ohhh Boy—You Rook at Deese Buttahns, Coal and Switches, Kris Kringle Survives—Despite Best Efforts of One Rude Twelve Year Old, Stomach Distress, and That’s Not Something You See Everyday. Our saga begins…

Saturday, December 21. It is warm. My eyes are closed but I can feel the sun high overhead. The waves are quiet and I can hear a few bathers a good distance down the beach. I have never been to the beach in the off season—this is incredible. I drift off to sleep again, then…bumpTHUMPcreak “The kids say something stinks downstairs and I smell it too—it smells like something overheating like wires or something—can you smell it up here?” I jerked up in bed and felt the sharp jab of every stiff muscle in my body, “OWW I MEANT TO GET UP WHEN YOU DID AND HELP YOU GET THE CLOTHES DOWN BUT I WENT BACK TO SLEEP WHAT’S WRONG LET ME GET DRESSED OW!!”

My eyes felt like I had slept face down in iron filings. “It’s okay, you don’t have to get up yet, but the washing machine just stopped, and I can’t get it going again.” I tried to breathe, but the entire left side of my head was clogged with sickly humours. I hacked and rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock. 7:05. Why yes, it’s much too late for anyone but lazy slugabeds! And yes, I’m quite sure that I did not have to get up then, just because a wife type person came in and woke me from a dead sleep.

I got my glasses and stood up and shuffled my way to the bathroom, where I was met by a horrifyingly grizzled drifter with wild standup hair and my underwear on. Reminded self not to look in mirror in mornings. Got ankle and knee and sinuses working, brushed teeth, shaved, got dressed and went downstairs to the laundry room.

Stench of the burnt flesh of Reddy Kilowatt. Tub full of water and blue jeans. 15 year old Kenmore. You do the math.

“Well, Reba, guess what’s for Christmas?” She guessed right. It had been leaking water intermittently for a while, along with a bit of oil. Finally decided to give up after many years of good hard service. AND GAVE UP ON STINKIN’ CHRISTMAS VACATION! STUPID RASACRASMAL*&&%$#. And all that. But at least I could act heroic and manly.

After a few minutes of study and butt scratching, the day’s sequence of events congealed in my head—drain water, remove door to laundry room, get washer out with hand trucks, move to driveway via garage for the charity appliance picker-uppers, take truck to store, buy gleaming monument to the genius that is America, drive back, crush self to death getting said appliance off of truck, find that death would be too easy, spatula self from under washer like Wile E. Coyote and walk around bobbing and squeaking like a concertina, roll new hole in bank account back into house, hook up hoses, complete laundry, congratulate self for having both an X and a Y chromosome, then hide.

A noble plan, indeed.

Well then, the water. Being the scientific genius I am, I realized that merely bailing the water out of the tub was much too base, and called for an elegant Heroic solution, namely the magic of the siphon. I rummaged around in my garage full of crap and came up short in the hose department. There were the abundant lengths of garden hoses, but they were all dirty and outside and probably full of slugs.

TO THE HARDWARE STORE! To buy hose. Franklin the Truck sputtered and hammered and flamed to life and coasted down to the foot of the hill, where we found that the local hardware store had no flexible tubing. (I guess because it’s not hard or something.) Next best thing? Why, washing machine hoses, bucko! They’ll be just long enough, or I could even hook them end to end!

(At this point, I will jump into the future of the story and remind both you and myself that washing machine hoses have two female ends, and are thus incapable of being joined together without a male-male coupling. I knew that one time a long time ago, but forgot it until the moment came when I opened the bag of hoses, at which point I sorta smacked myself in the forehead, like this *!*.)

OH, yeah, and I needed some hand trucks. Remember this—when you plan, make sure you plan based on the stuff you already have. Finally found a set which the hardware folks had been using around the store—20 bucks. A deal for sure. Oh, yeah, and a hinge. Why? Well, you see, when we moved in, the middle hinge of the laundry room door didn’t have a hinge pin, so I force-fit a slightly too big one in and the door had been slightly bound up too tight ever since. Of course, the best thing would be a hinge pin, but the hardware store was also devoid of these, too. I don’t know why. SO, I bought a hinge, with the idea that I would get its pin and be all better. Because I’m real stupid that way.

Got back, decided to go ahead and take door off, and found that brand new hinge and pin were the exact same slightly too big thing that I had tried to use five years ago. Crap. Oh well, probably won’t be the only trip to the hardware store today, he said with incredible prescience.

On to the water. Take out jeans and wring into tub. Prepare hose.

Slurp, two gallons into bucket, dump into toilet.
Slurp, two gallons into bucket, dump into toilet.
Slurp, two gallons into bucket, dump into toilet.
Slurp, two gallons into bucket, dump into toilet.
Slurp, two gallons into bucket, dump into toilet.

Continue about five more times. Include two slurps which lasted about a half second too long, resulting in getting a nice mouthful of cold, soapy, indigo stained water. Also give yourself a pain in your sternum to replicate that of having to physically hold the ends of hose down into both tub and bucket as water slowly drained. Watch about 45 minutes drift away from your otherwise rich and rewarding life. Finally, get out hated plastic dipper to get remaining water out of tub unreachable by end of hose and curse the very idea of having to soil the purity of the operation by bailing. Also take a moment to wonder why it was that in your first trip to the hardware store that you did not just purchase a small $5 electric pump. Finally, get several beach towels off of shelf and finish sopping up remaining water. Curse.

That done it was time to move some things and unhook hoses and cords and tubes. Hand trucks are used for a very crucial five minutes in order to swing old dead machine through doorway then into kitchen to the bewildered gaze of small children who suddenly felt the urge to gambol underneath Daddy while he was working. Silly, silly children. Go, children. Go, Go! Before Daddy has a coronary.

Get it placed just so outside so that it is not in full view of everyone and come back inside. “Guess what?” Aw crap. “What?” came my timid query. “The dryer vent has a split in it.” Whew. I was half expecting she had found Jimmy Hoffa or something. And that explains a lot about all the lint in the laundry room. In any case, dryer vent hoses are no problem for manly he-men repair guys like me, and provided an excuse for yet another trip to the hardware store. But this time, it was not just a hardware store, but the evil, crushing big-box brute known as Home Depot, which actually has appliances and hardware and stuff you would expect to find in a hardware store!

Franklin and I hit the road again and reached the strip mall which houses both Home Depot and a Super Target and about a half jillion other stores busting at the seams with Christmas shoppers. Resisting the urge to make better time by employing my revving engine/exploding muffler gag I finally got to the Promised Land and went inside.

Looking for good and cheap. Not too cheap, but not something for the Fortress of Solitude, either. Hmmm. $1,000 front load Maytag, eh. I got your lonely, mister. Finally found the Admiral toploads for more reasonable amounts of arms and legs and was met by a pleasant clerk who told me she should would be right back.

(Another break in the action here—please remember that I have not had breakfast yet, and am already in a swoon due to being in a giant hardware store, and this girl was a redhead.)

She came back and asked what I was looking for. Not too cheap, but not too expensive. We looked at the Admiral and found out it was not in stock. She really knew her machinery, though, and we looked at some Maytags and compared and contrasted. She said she loved the one her husband had bought for her. But doggone it, I told her, the same features of the Maytag could be had on that Admiral model for a hundred less bucks. She looked again and the Admiral couldn’t be delivered until after Christmas. Sigh. “Well, I guess I’ll run over to Sears and see what they’ve got.”

I hated to leave because she had been so nice. It’s hard to find clerks in big stores who actually know what they’re doing—they’re mostly kids with the social skills of a rock, and slightly less intelligence. And she just looked so darned cute in her scruffy, grubby, too-big gray jacket with the ends of the sleeves rolled up and her hair pulled back in a big clip and with her green eyes just a’looking at the computer. I guess she was my age or older, but she could have been a lot older, there was no way of telling without looking at her birth certificate. She had the signs of a life cleanly lived—no drinking or smoking or staying out too late or hanging with the wrong crowd and reading Cosmo and stuff—no wrinkles, just a couple of gray hairs, no makeup but didn’t need it anyway.

“Did you see the ones over on the other side of the aisle?” “You mean there’s MORE!” Hey, maybe I didn’t have to leave! There was a whole line of GEs over there, and she thought I had seen them. I walked over and started checking prices and features and then was hit by a sudden attack of the old fart. “But this has a plastic tub. I don’t think I want a plastic tub. Doesn’t the Admiral (that’s not in stock, remember) have a metal tub? Gee, plastic…”

Next thing you know, I would have started singing the praises of back when I had to use rocks. I guess I sounded like some clod who had just showed up at the computer store to upgrade from DOS—‘Oh, I don’t know about that Internet thing.’

She leaned on the one next to the one I was examining, “I really don’t think the tub should be a big concern—these are molded so that there are no snags like the older plastic tubs, and the material is a much more durable kind than they used even a couple of years ago. You’ll probably wear out the machine before you do the tub.” I raised back up out of the depths of the washer and turned toward her. Wow, she was good. Did I mention that she had deep chestnut red hair? And big green eyes?

SNAP OUT OF IT, MAN!

Too late. I was just a big squishy bucket of goo. She wrote up the ticket and I hunkered over the counter admiring her short little fingers with the rough nails and that darned chestnut hair pulled back just so and the great big golf shirt she had on under the grubby gray jacket, and as I stood there handing over all of the Christmas money, I noticed that her shop apron had a wire loop full of little embroidered patches—must have been twenty or thirty. Each one saying “Employee of the Month.” In addition she had five or six more little metal pins across the top of the apron “Top Producer,” “Service Award,” stuff like that. NO BLEEDIN’ WONDER! Some poor sap wanders in looking for hinge pins and she sells him a $10,000 Generac.

HINGE PINS! Ooh, almost forgot that! And dryer vent hose! Yikes. Luckily, they had both, so even more Christmas money got spent on those items.

I went out to get the truck and wait for the washer to come from the back and mull over how it was that I got to be so pathetic when she motioned me back inside. Oh crap. Something bad. “You know I told you we had that one in stock? Guess what…” I was crestfallen, and it must have shown. “No, wait now. Come over here. That one was out of stock, but I got you the next model up for the same price. Is that okay?”

Hmmm.

Well, of course it is!

Not to be outdone, she even laughed when I warned her not to let the loading guy scratch the bed of the truck (which is mostly rust held together by dirt and will power).

Got home and gingerly slid the machine out of the truck bed with no drama or death and got it right in and held Reba in thrall with the story of how it came to be ours. (Sans the rhapsodic paean to petite, softly-constructed, doe-eyed, mind-control-wave-generating sales clerks—this was distilled to “She was very sweet and helpful and she gave me a good deal.” No use pushing my Christmas luck.)

The dryer vent was replaced, the floor was scrubbed of accumulated motor oil and dirt, and the new machine was wrestled into place, the hoses hooked up (with the siphoning set to be held in reserve as replacements) and the plug shoved into the outlet. Success! And the hinge pin fit perfectly! Success! Sorta.

Just as I was putting the door back in place, the BOTTOM hinge half pulled its screws right out of the soft core of the door. CURSE WORD! The little short screws had stripped the holes long ago, and since the door was so hard to close, I had forgotten about it. Needed longer screws. TO THE HARDWARE STORE!

Slightly after noon, and I now am making the third trip to a hardware store. I grabbed the hinge that didn’t work before and went back to the bottom of the hill and exchanged it and got some longer screws. Home again, hinge half back on, all pins set, door swings like Barry Bonds now. Success!

But again, since I’m stupid, and since the morning had progressed without me killing myself with a major appliance, I started to think.

This is always bad.

You see, our microwave oven/range hood burnt out almost a year ago. I have gotten near weekly updates about how nice it would be to have a microwave that worked in the kitchen. I have just shot a huge hole in our account for a washing machine. But, we were going to have to replace it anyway, sometime. Right? Why not now? It’s Christmas, Reba has already decided large home appliances do make a pretty nice gift, I had a helpful person at the store, and I was in full testosterone, truck driving, beating and banging and destruction mode.

“Hey Reba. I was thinking…” “You want to replace the microwave, too?”

Good grief. In the Great Game of the Sexes, I am Chutes and Ladders. Yes, that’s what I wanted to do, so one more time, a’hunting and gathering I went. First stop—to look for Superwoman. Bad news. Shift change had caused my helpful young woman to evaporate into nothingness, replaced with dull-eyed dudes and this really stringy looking woman who had the misfortune to be walking by. “Do you have any of these in stock?” A simple question which led to much hand-wringing, two-way radio chatter with some other slack-brained yayhoo, much looking upward at the rows of boxes above, moving of ladders and some guy to lift and tote. Yes, they had exactly one of the kind I wanted. The guy she called climbed up and got it onto the floor and left to go smoke a joint. The box had a tremendous hole in one corner, and looked like it had been hastily retaped. I looked around in vain for anything else that would do, and finally asked if I could open the box to make sure it was not damaged. She tugged and pulled trying to get the tape off as I zipped it open with my pocketknife. (I bet Connie would have had a box cutter—a special gold-plated one with “Number One Employee” on it.)

Open the box, pull the microwave, and just as I suspected, it looked like it had taken a direct hit from a grenade. The whole side was dented in and the back was buckled. “Wow, it sure does look like it mighta got damaged! I bet if you’da tried to put that in, it probly wouldn’ta fit!” Thank you, Nancy Drew, for the stunning insight. I left her there with the pile of microwave parts and headed out for the other big box down the street, Lowe’s.

Lowe’s was a distinct contrast—huge rows of bright appliances (including the washer I had bought earlier—looks like I saved around $75 or so!) and two whole rows of over the range microwaves. I was standing there looking at a GE and a Frigidaire and suddenly I was swept up by a very nattily dressed, gray haired, bespectacled, and slightly effeminate sexagenarian Japanese sales clerk. “Oh, dis one vary good, and dis one vary good. You use dis thahmamotere to check the tempachu of tha food—verrrrry niiiiicce. And oh boy!, looka tha buttahns on here with popacor and baka pototu and bewarage. Verrrrrry nice. Not so much price as this one, but this have two rack for the cook food and it have---ohhhh, boy, looka that Niccce! You not go wrong either one vary nice and cook good. You like eat, yes? Of course you do!”

I wound up getting the Frigidaire, mainly because it did have the very cool thermometer probe. “Marry Creesmas—Happy New Year!” Good thing he didn’t have red hair, I suppose.

Anyway, got THAT home and proceeded to yank the old one and install the new. Which is much harder than it sounds and involves drilling holes into the cabinets which already had holes in them for the other microwave, and trying to make sure the new one doesn’t carom off my knee and fall into the floor and much euphemistic swearing and bad thoughts. Oh, and one more trip to the hardware store for something that I can’t even remember now.

Finally, along about five o’clock, it was done. And so was I. Then it was child cleaning time. Then it was time for me to collapse onto the bed.

And that was just the Saturday before Christmas. Each succeeding day until now was similarly full of stuff to do, but since it is now the end of my work day, I now must leave and go home and do more such superhuman tasks. And tomorrow, you will get to hear about some of the other promised tales and stories.

And yes, that is a warning.
posted by Terry at 4:59:00 PM