I bought my first major appliances this past weekend. Oh, we bought a dishwasher at the old house but that was totally Dug's doing, I didn't think I needed one (I was wrong. I often am). But the washer and dryer at the old place came with the house and they refused to die, even though I gazed upon them balefully as they noisily agitated and rattled, wishing they would explode so I could justify replacing them. But, that was then, and Friday is the first day of the rest of my front loading, drying rack, sitting-on-pedestal-drawered life.
Which means I have no more excuses and must pottytrain Maggie. That oughtta be a hoot.
My new kitchen is great. It's a little awkward, it wants a little modernizing, but it's fine. It has a vent hood, which is fabulous. The old house had none, and the previous owners were big fans of the deep-frying. When we bought that place it took me hours to make the kitchen even barely habitable: the walls were caked with grease and in some places there was fake weave hair stuck to the grease. At six or seven or however many months pregnant, there I was climbing up a ladder with a rag and a vast array of every degreasing chemical on the market. It's a wonder Molly wasn't born with a natural orange oil fragrance.
Anyway, the vent hood: it's harvest gold. And it works like a charm, because last night I seared a halibut fillet and the whole house didn't end up smelling like Alaska.
Also harvest gold: my sink, which has another thing I haven't had since I left Mom's house, a garbage disposal. I seem to have forgotten the rules about garbage disposals though, and yesterday I think I shoved a little too much of the remainder of the spaghetti leftovers in there at one time, because it backed up into the other side of the sink. I had no earthly idea where the plunger might be. Instead of freaking out though, I simply pondered. What would Martha do? What would Heloise do? What would Erma do?
Well, Erma would have gone to bed, probably. But Martha and Heloise would do what I did: I put a big pot of water on to boil, and then I went back to making the compound butter that would grace the fish later on (dijon mustard, garlic, and thyme), and then when the water was boiling I dumped a bunch of baking soda in the general direction of the drain (which was under two inches of greasy orange spaghetti water), followed it with a glug of white vinegar, and then poured half the pot of boiling water down into the little science project I'd created. Zoom, everything down the drain. I repeated the process for good measure, and then I washed my sink. The butter, by the way, was terrific.
And not to brag, but my fridge has a water and ice dispenser. To be perfectly honest with you, having one of these was one of the Things To Do Before I Die, and it is even better than I expected. I have had so much water in the past week, and it has been AWESOME. It totally validates the scope of things I have chosen to wish to do or own before dying, which isn't exactly Everest-level stuff.
The kids are pretty happy. There's a bit more running around space for them, and the ceilings are higher so they can get a fuller tone when they're shrieking at the tops of their lungs. They don't even mind the newly enforced "eat only in the kitchen or dining room" rules, enacted when we discovered enough cereal hiding under our furniture at the old house to feed a small impoverished nation (I wish I was exaggerating for comic effect).
And that's all I have time for today.
