Attack of the Out of Control Washing Machine

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Our washing machine is out of control.

The evening before we left for the beach, I ran a load of wash. When I went to pull the clothes out of the washer, I found that all of the clothes were intensely water logged and each article weighed nearly 100 pounds. So, this led me to believe that the spin cycle was not spinning and therefore our washer needed to be repaired. But, since we were going out of town that night, I had to wait until we returned to get it serviced.

So, yesterday, a very nice young man came to look at the washer. He asked us for some heavy clothes and towels and sheets so he could test the cycles. And we obliged, handing over Dan’s t-shirts and a set of sheets and some towels. We stood back while he attempted to get a cycle going — filling the machine with water and then attempting to spin the items dry. And nothing. No spin.

So then he did all sorts of crazy stuff, taking the top control panel apart and blowing some sort of cleaning fluid in the pieces and unconnecting and reconnecting parts. He even took off the entire body of the washer, leaving the drum exposed and naked.

Then, when I thought things could not get any worse, the darn thing started to fill with water on its own accord and thrash about like a bucking bronco. I screeched and jumped up and down as water started pouring over the top of the drum and all over my floor. But, this episode did not deter the repair man. He launched into heroics, practically bear-hugging the drum while alternatively blowing into some plastic tubing (which he later told me had something to do with the pressure) and messing with the controls to try and get the darn thing to drain.

After all of the problems we had encountered, I just had to laugh. And I felt bad, but, come on, the man was practically performing CPR on my washer, blowing air into its plastic coil while water poured over the top and sloshed all over the place like it was an out of control sea monster. So I laughed because otherwise I would cry. I laughed as I got slightly soaked with the water from my washer, thinking that Dan and I would be known to our new neighbors as the “smelly people” because I knew we were getting low on clean clothes.

Repair man determined that the control for the water level was also in need of repair (umm…duh…my floor is all wet) and the spinner was still not spinning. And of course these parts need to be ordered. So he left, and Dan and I proceeded to submerge ourselves in water to get out the clothes and towels and sheets still in the drum of the washer. Of course they weighed about 100 pounds each. And now I have a washing machine full of water sitting in my basement on a wet floor. He better come back with those parts because each time I do the wash, I am not going to brace the machine with my body and blow air into a pressure valve. But, at least I am still laughing ;-)

Beach Week: Day 4

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Sadly today is our last day at the beach because tomorrow we need to head home to take care of a recalcitrant washing machine and put together our messy excuse for a home.
So today we enjoyed our last day on the beach, Dan attempted to boogie board, and I bought gold shoes at the local beach shop.
And tonight is Mexican Fiesta theme dinner night. Ole!

Beach Week: Day 3

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Today featured many shopping expeditions — my favorite kind of day.

First, Laura and I ventured to a bookstore to select new beach reads. This bookstore, tucked into a shopping center off the main road, featured that mom-and-pop-store feel with books stuffed sort of randomly on its super tall shelves. But, we dug up some good reads, including essential Jane Austen classics.

Since the weather threatened to bring about severe rain showers, the gals and I took off to the outlets for shopping fun. We did some damage at the JCrew and Gap for essential items like cardigans and funky headbands.

Although Dan and I were supposed to be in charge of dinner tonight, I ditched him for the aforementioned shopping trip while he made delicious chicken breasts stuffed with spinach and feta. Good thing he is used to being the chef in our relationship ;-)

Beach Week: Day 2

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Today we all learned an important lesson: do not use liquor as a mixer for…liquor. As some can attest to (present company excluded) this results in illness and extreme hangover.

It started out innocently enough with some sweet tea vodka mixed with tequila and Country Time Lemonade. As a public service announcement, I must warn readers that this is not a recommended cocktail.

So today some people recovered from hangovers at the beach. And Dan attempted to skim board. And we all watched and laughed.
Tonight is steak night, and perhaps the evening will bring about a rousing game of telephone pictionary. But I am pretty sure tonight will no longer feature sweet tea vodka.

Beach Week: Day 1

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After this crazy week, I am pleased to announce I am now at the beach with a few of my favorite folks for what promises to be another spectacularly entertaining beach week.

Dan and his friends have been keeping up the beach week tradition for nine years now. Nine years of debauchery, bocce ball, kayaking, and general rabble rousing. These young gentlemen slowly but surely added their ladies to the mix, which I think most definitely improves beach week. Because, let’s face it, the ladies add a necessary amount of decorum to the situation ;-)

So we drove down last night and spent the day gathering the beach week essentials at the grocery, i.e. hamburger meat and Coronas, and lazed the afternoon away beach side.

Ah, pass the guacamole and let the relaxing begin :-)

File This Under: Why Do These Things Happen to Me?

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This week has been nothing short of a disaster. My new home is a disaster, our stuff is a disaster, and work this week has been putting out one disaster after another.

And yet it managed to get worse. Case in point – a highly disastrous AND awkward situation occurred yesterday that resulted in tears, ruined clothes, and a big ego and behind bruise.

Per usual, I was doing my daily stroll through my building, walking across my floor and down the five flights to the first floor. One of the worst things around this building is the marble floor on the first floor in strategically-placed spots, like in front of the elevators and doorways. Usually, this is no problem, as I am most likely wearing appropriate shoes and carefully walk around the marble.

So, yesterday, I walked down the five flights of stairs and out the first floor door, and, before I knew what happened, my feet came out from under me and I felt myself hit the marble floor with a sickening thud. This scared me, and I sighed with relief when I saw I was in one piece and did not hit my head, but my relief quickly evaporated when I realized I smelled something?like I was sitting in something. I attempted to scoot myself up and realized I did not just slip on the marble, oh no, I slipped because someone spilled smelly cafeteria vegetable soup all over the floor. And I was sitting in a pile of that gross stuff. IN MY WHITE PANTS!

Yes, friends, Sarah Rosemary managed to fall on the marble floor in a pile of stinky vegetable soup in her white pants.

I managed to get up (note: other employees saw me and did nothing – real nice) and hobble my way to the nearest bathroom because when I fell, my right foot went under the left leg and smacked real hard on the floor, resulting in much swelling. When I made it to the bathroom and turned around to look at myself, I must admit that I pretty much had a mini-meltdown right there in bathroom.

When I managed to compose myself and wipe off some of the soup dripping from my rear end, I made my way back up to my floor, grabbed my Tide-to-Go stick, and proceeded to Tide my pants in the bathroom stall.

And this worked somewhat, I managed to at least dull the brownish-red stains (how awful on one’s backside – why did I not fall front ways?!). By this time, my poor right foot is good and swollen. I am also getting super mad. I have two hours left to wear these smelly, stained pants and hobble around on this swollen foot.

Those were probably the longest two hours I have ever spent at work. And this is an experience I hope to never repeat. Also, as soon as I made it back to my desk, I ordered new white pants online. Take that, stinky soup.

Target: My Drug of Choice

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What is it about Target that prevents me from leaving without spending at least $50?

I swear, there is something about those flashy displays and those red carts and that cute dog with the bulls eye over his eye that makes me put so much random stuff in my cart and shop with wild abandon. It is like some sort of force field prevents me from leaving before reaching some magic limit.

Every time I go there, it is like my frontal lobe switches off, and I come to the conclusion that I need a new t-shirt, shaving cream, a magazine, hangers, mascara, ballpoint pens, and some Lysol. And yet somehow I am still gob smacked when my total is $52.48.

Sometimes I can prevent this Target binge shopping by only allowing myself to go to certain areas of the store. Also, I pretty much have to keep my head down lest I see something that catches my eye, some shiny object like a beach tote or jasmine vanilla body gel and lotion or a new bestseller on my list of books to read.

I try not to succumb to Target’s wily ways and keep focused on not adding superfluous items to my red cart, but it is real, real hard. That place just has everything! It is so maddening! I find so many things I did not know I needed. For instance, how have I lived 24 years without a cooling rack for my assorted baked goods? Clearly I needed that. And a spoon rest? Of course, who wants a dirty spoon lying out on their counter? Obviously I also need a set of funky melamine dishes for an inevitable get together at our new place, never mind I have other sets of dishes. And while I am here, I might as well pick up some new PJs.

See what Target does? And the more you go, the more addicted you become. I shamelessly admit that the Target ad in the Sunday paper is my favorite. And I go on the Web site at least once a day. Evidently, I have a problem, and, quite frankly, I am do not want to give it up. The satisfaction from shopping there is just too great. Now if only my credit card could see Target like I do :-)

Finally, A Plumbing Issue I Had Nothing To Do With

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A terrible situation has occurred that might just be worse that the extreme heat I suffer in this building.

Yesterday afternoon some crazy sort of plumbing situation busted up all of the bathrooms on one side of the building. I discovered this because on my once every 45 minutes trip to our bathroom, the door was locked. Hmm?I thought. Well, sometimes for reasons I will never understand, some people like to use our communal bathroom as their personal dressing room/makeup counter, so perhaps someone needed to make an outfit change and needed the entire bathroom to do so.

So, I decided to head down the stairs one flight to the other bathroom, only to find out that it, too, was locked. It was then that I realized that something else was going on, and I had to quickly high tail it back upstairs and to the bathroom on the other side of the building before my poor bladder exploded.

On my way back, I ran into coworkers also sprinting down the hall with angry looks on their faces, as we are used to using the bathroom right outside our suite and not the one light years away. I inquired at our front desk about this either 1) mean prank or 2) potential bathroom incident, and it came to light that some super nasty sewer episode managed to wreck havoc on the entire plumbing on our side of the building. This was confirmed by our friends on the first floor who said their bathroom looked like a giant mud monster exploded in there. Awesome.

I hoped against hope that today the issue would be resolved, but alas, it as not, and if I wish to use the bathroom, I must dash over to the other side of the building. I am not opposed to additional steps, but the real thing that concerns me is the dramatic increase in people to bathrooms. I am a big believe in a low ratio of people to bathrooms. In fact, I am certain that the secret to marital bliss is separate bathrooms. So, therefore, I also believe that the fewer people using one bathroom, the better. And I really liked our bathroom because only my suite and one other suite used it. It was super tidy and more often than not I was the only one in there at any one time. Now this new bathroom situation has multiple suites full of workers using the same bathroom. And this upsets me greatly. I so appreciated our nice bathroom we had mostly to ourselves, and I really want it back.

So today I will keep praying that whatever happened with the sewer is fixed in short order because, well, I cannot hold it all day.

Guest Room Occupant — But Definitely Not a Guest

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I am really enjoying this week back living at home. I think Dan is a little worried that I will like it so much that I will not want to leave to go to our new house when he returns ;-)

No worries, I am certain I will be itching to get into our new place and put all of our belongings in the correct locations. But for now it is like a little mini vacation, except for the part where I still get up and go to work every morning. Besides that, sort of like a vacation.

It is funny, too, how my little sister now occupies my old room, old bathroom. And it is a little weird sleeping in the guest room. Guest? No, that just does not fit right with me. I simply cannot be considered a guest. Guests are those mostly unrelated people who stay at your place in lieu of a hotel, so they can see you and then do touristy things in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Guests are those people who get those special “company only” towels. And guests are those people who you pretty much only want to stay with you for four days, max.

So clearly I cannot be considered a guest.

Not having my own defined room at my parent’s house anymore feels a little strange, even though I have an entire 2,200 square foot home sitting, waiting for me the next town over. Where all the rooms are my room (well, Dan’s, too). But I still think that when I head to that basement bedroom, I will see my old twin bed and my desk covered with my school books and laptop and my dresser with my jewelry box and my little closet stuffed to the gills with my shoes and clothes and handbags.

But now it is my sister?s space, and besides a few odds and ends that I handed down to her or the last remaining remnants of my life there – rollerblades, yearbooks, photo albums – all my stuff and the current Sarah?s life is waiting for me at the new house. Sitting in all those Dell computer boxes waiting for me to decide where it will live in the new place.

While it is definitely weird to be back at home in this new capacity, it is nice, too, that we all live so close that I can pop in to have dinner or stay the week or just stop by to say hello. And I like to see that I still have a place in their home – and most definitely not just their guest ;-)

My Life In Boxes

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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/OjDlVb-TkC4/SmO9p_GH3fI/AAAAAAAAJi0/KDeZU5Bm6Bk/s1600-h/Baron-in-the-car.jpg”> One can really learn what one can live without when almost all of one’s worldly possessions are in any number of boxes stacked five deep.

In the span of 12 hours, we moved out of the condo and into the new house with absolutely no hiccups. It was as if the moving gods smiled upon us since the weather was perfect, we had a stellar moving team, and we managed to move all of our belongings in one trip with the U-Haul, plus a car load of important stuff, i.e. a certain golden retriever and our liquor ;-)

Now, I tried to label the boxes as best as I could, but we most definitely have three or four total grab bag boxes. They contain the craziest assortment of who knows what – Listerine, bundt cake carrier, a two liter of diet Mountain Dew, plunger, Dan?s flip flops, a spray bottle of Windex – the last minute stuff that just did not get organized.

As a type A, Container Store lover, clutter hater and all around stickler for organization, the state of our home right now pretty much puts the desire to systematize center of my brain into high alert mode. But, alas, since Dan most unfortunately had to go out of town this week and the lack of modern day conveniences, i.e. Internet, TV, and phone, are not hooked up at our new place, I decided to stay at my parent’s house this week, thus leaving my new house to look like Bed, Bath and Beyond, Crate and Barrel, and Ann Taylor Loft exploded in there.

So I am a nomad at my parent?s house, living out of a suitcase and garment bags. In the meantime, I am mentally planning what my new home will look like, sans boxes, and trying to quell my extreme urge to organize. And until then, we can play a fun game of Where In the World Is Our ______ (insert necessary item here).