The week before last was pretty wretched for us mechanically. The Passat was in the shop on Tuesday, the Fox went in for repairs on Thursday and then on Friday the unthinkable happened:
Our washing machine broke.
Technically, it wasn’t our washing machine that broke. This is the washing machine that came with our house when we rented it. It had been acting up for awhile and finally, it just stopped working. We had planning to buy a washer and dryer when we moved into this house, because the landlady had put laundry hook-ups upstairs for us. The washer and dryer that came with the place are only accessible from the outside, down a flight of steep stairs and it’s pretty inconvenient to go down there to do laundry. It’s pitch black out there at night which makes the stairs are trecherous and during the day it’s hard to run down there if one of us is alone with Wyatt because we need to bring him along. When it came time for us to actually buy the washer and dryer, we realized that we had a problem. The landlady had put a regular 110v plug in, not a 220v outlet. This made our already limited choices (there was only room for a stackable) even slimmer. Grrrr. After looking around at department stores and on Craigslist for a while we decided to just give up and brave the stairs to the backyard. And then the washer broke.
On a whim, I decided to search Craigslist to see if there was anything available there and that’s when I found this beauty:
The LG WM3431 All in One Washer/Dryer. Yes, you read that right — this baby is a washer AND a dryer! All in the same machine! How cool is that??
So far, we are loving it. Mostly, we’re just using the washing machine because, as you know, we are hanging our wash out on the line these days. It gets our clothes phenomenally clean and it’s so easy to do laundry that we seem to have a load going at all times now. Our biggest problem now is keeping up with the folding….
So I am in San Jose. I’m here for work for a week and I’m staying in a hotel. That means not seeing my guys for a bunch of nights in a row. We’re talking on the phone of course, but it’s just not the same. I was doing OK until tonight and then I started getting lonesome for them. I could tell it was getting bad when I started telling my co-workers Wyatt stories non-stop over our sushi dinner tonight. Lucky for me, they are good natured fellas with kids of their own so they indulged me.
I’m here to take a class on the new content management system (CMS) Nolo just purchased for our redesign. The class has been OK so far. We had a few technical difficulties yesterday and now we’re scrambling a bit to catch up so class is starting a half hour early tomorrow.
I’m eating too much junk food. One of the strategies people employ to keep you alert in technical training environments is to give you unlimited access to coffee, candy, cookies, chips and soda. I don’t even want that stuff half the time, but it’s hard to resist when I’m tired and we’re heading into the seventh hour of CMS configuration exercises.
Um…what else? I bought some pretty paper yesterday. Check these out:
The prettiest sheet of flat paper I bought was this flowery, swirly print with gold shimmery stuff on it, but I couldn’t find it on the Paper Source web site which is really too bad because I swear, even if you’re usually indifferent to paper you would fall down on your knees and worship this particular piece of paper if you saw it.
Wyatt’s Uncle Bon-Bon took us all to a friends and family screening of Ratatouille at Pixar tonight. It was terrific! We’re big fans of Pixar movies around these parts so it’s probably no surprise that I liked this one as well, but it really exceeded my expectations. I knew it would have a great story because Pixar movies always do, but what really surprised me was how great the animation was. Yeah, yeah, I know — I should have expected that. But it’s really amazing how much better the animation gets from one movie to another. Some of the things that particularly impressed me were: the rats’ fur, the people’s hair, the water scene and the cityscapes of Paris. The other animation related thing that I think is worth noting is that they’ve completely worked out the people issue. The humans in this movie are decidedly non-creepy and weird looking (except for the villains who are meant to be). We’ve been watching Toy Story a lot lately and those people give me the willies, so it was nice not to get tripped up on that in this movie. Some of the other things I liked:
Janeane Garofalo as a French lady chef, imparting her years of wisdom to Remy’s clueless side-kick
the mean, Steve Jobs-ian restaurant critic and his trip back to childhood
the thought that a kids movie is going to introduce millions of children to haute cuisine
the rat’s-eye-view chase scenes
there’s a knock-your-socks off kitchen scene at the end that I can’t wait to watch over and over again on DVD
If you can’t wait to see the movie, check out the Ratatouille web site, or read this great New York Times article: A Rat with a Whisk and a Dream (requires login).
Cupcakes – my new obsession. Did you know people devote entire blogs to cupcake recipes and take beautiful pictures of them? Go here and tell me that you don’t want to lick the screen.
Lily Allen — thanks to Allison for turning me on to her. My favorite song so far is the very funny Alphie. Wyatt likes to have family dance parties to Lily Allen music too.
The “Born OK the first time” bumper sticker I saw right before the oil light went on yesterday. I like “01-20-09” even better though.
The Sopranos — I know I just talked about the Sopranos the other day, but we watched the penultimate episode Wednesday night and it was fantastic. I can’t wait for Sunday.
The new One Dollar Coins — I got my first $1 coin from a parking lot machine yesterday. It had John Adams on it. Words cannot express my love of one dollar coins (and you should ask my co-workers how many words they’ve heard as I try to express it).
Boy howdy — this has been a crazy week! I know I say this all the time, but dang…when it rains, it pours.
Monday morning, Zach and I both woke up sick. Zach was worse off than I was, but we were both feeling pretty miserable, so it started the week off on the wrong foot. Meanwhile, Monday was the first day back at my job after my boss left, so all the things she used to handle started coming my way. I dutifully wrote every request down in my planner and at the end of the day, I had 22 items on my list! Yikes! That’s especially crazy since I tend to average about 5 things per day.
Tuesday through Thursday, I attended the Internet Retailers conference in San Jose. In a fantastically bad decision on my part, I chose to drive to SJ and back every day instead of just renting a hotel room down there and expensing it. The reason I decided to do that was that I thought being away that long would be hard on Wyatt. But what I didn’t account for was that the drive from here to there takes an hour and a half during rush hour (and vice versa), so I had to leave every morning before Wyatt was awake and I only got home a few hours before his bedtime each night. So I pretty much didn’t see him anyway.
Tuesday night, my friend Lisa was in town. It’s always a special treat to hang out with her, but I overbooked a little, I think. I was up at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, then I drove down to San Jose, spent the day at the concert, drove back to El Cerrito, stopped at home to make a couple of phone calls and check my email and then headed right back out to meet up with Lisa and Allison for drinks. That normally would be a phenomenally busy day for me but when you add the fact that I was sick, I was pretty beat by the time I got home. It was also pretty upsetting for Wyatt to have me dash in after a day away and then immediately turn around to leave again. When I came in, I told him I was only home for a little while and then I was going to go see my friends. He sat down on the floor and started crying and saying, “I don’t want you to go see your friends, Mama!” When I told him that I needed to go because I don’t get to see my friends very often he said, “No! Mama stay here! Daddy will go see your friends instead!” Awwwwww…poor little buddy.
The last little bit of icing on the cake for the week happened this evening. The conference let out a little earlier than usual today, at 4:30. I was thrilled because that meant that if I hurried I’d be able to get on the road before traffic got too bad. I had smooth sailing for about 10 minutes and then hit some stop and go traffic. I’d only been sitting there for a couple of minutes when the oil light came on with a very loud beep. Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I’m not very good about car maintenance, (I owned the Fox for 5 years before I got an oil change) so when I saw the light come on I freaked out a little. The oil light seemed like a bad thing to me, but I thought it also might be one of those things that means you should look into it when you get a chance, but don’t sweat it too much. And dang did I want to get home…. My better judgment prevailed though, and I was stopped in traffic anyway, so I called Zach to see if he knew what to do. He thought the oil light was pretty bad too but he wasn’t positive, so he called the mechanic to find out what to do. As everyone reading this probably knows, the oil light is a bad thing, so the mechanic told me to pull off the freeway ASAP, and check the oil. He told me that if the oil was low, I should add some synthetic 5-40 oil and if the oil level was OK I should have the car towed to his garage immediately and not drive another inch.
I slowly, slooooowly made my way to an exit through the terrible traffic and found a gas station on the GPS. When I checked the oil, it didn’t even register on the dip-stick! Yikes! Of course, when I went into the gas station to get some oil, they had 5-30 and 10-40, but no 5-40. Crap. I walked across the street to a Walgreen’s figuring they might have more kinds of oil, but they didn’t have any 5-40 either and none of the many, many bottles indicated they were synthetic. We have already established that I am oil-tarded, so of course I had no idea what to do. I got back on the phone with Zach who got back on the phone with the mechanic who told me I could put in 5-30 or 10-40, but to avoid the regular kind of oil. So I tromped back across the street to the gas station and bought the oil they had there because I knew that bottle said “synthetic”.
When I finally got back to the car and put the oil in, I realized how bad the oil light thing actually was. I had to pour an entire quart of oil in before anything even registered on the dipstick and another half bottle before it was at the proper level! Yikes! I’m lucky the engine didn’t seize up or kersplode or something. After I got the oil thing all taken care of, I got back on the road and had an uneventful ride home. And now I’m sitting on the couch. And I don’t have to drive down to freaking San Jose tomorrow. Yay!
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daily life
at Christmas and it still made me laugh until my stomach ached tonight:
