This is the kind of week its' been: I just turned around while 3 people were talking at me and I was trying to pour red juice without spilling, and I found the only silent person in the family--the baby--sitting in a small puddle of vomit that he had produced, and he was picking the chunks out and eating them. It's been THAT kind of a week.
Right before we moved, I bought a pair of computers for $40 off Craigslist hoping to use them as school computers and sincerely hoping one was strong enough to put our MagicJack on so that we could use it instead of Vonage, since I paid $50 for 5 years of service on the MagicJack and we were porting our Vonage number to Tim's cell phone (which finally happened after 6 weeks of waiting even though it was supposed to take 4 hours--turns out once they schedule it, even if they do it wrong, there's no changing it. Someone accidentally typed in May 26 instead of May 2-6, and that was it). Anyway, I was disappointed to find one computer was too slow using Windows XP to process the more complex school activities, so that one wouldn't work for the new phone system. And the other was fast, but it hung every time we turned it on.
My brother stopped by on his way to Disneyland, and he looked at it and said the memory was bad. So the next day, wishing I hadn't given away the computer that died (it's memory cards were fine--the motor went), I walked into the storage room and found a motherboard sitting there that the previous tenants had left. It was stripped of everything except 2 128mb memory cards! So I cracked open the computer and found it held 2 128 mb memory cards. It took me a few tries to get them in right (I didn't know the 2 slots were not interchangeable, so the first time I put them in backwards and they didn't work). Now the computer works great, and the phone system works fantastically (and we owe nothing on it until 2013!) The computer still won't load up from off if the peripherals are plugged in, but it also doesn't slow down or hang if we leave it on all night, so that's okay.
My next project was the dishwasher. The one in the house was rusting away inside, leaving a rust-colored, mineral-infused coating on all the dishes. Most of the holes were plugged, and it was just not good. The owner said, "Well, you have to pour vinegar in once a week." Maybe so--perhaps she should have told her sons that when they were living here for the past year? I didn't want to deal with it, especially since the tines on the racks were literally rusting off. So Tim went and got me a dishwasher we found on Craigslist that the owner swore worked fine, but he was selling it cheap ($25) because the faceplate was all scratched up. And it was.
So I spent all day yesterday yanking out the old dishwasher, most of the time with Benji on my lap trying to help. I did remember to turn off the water and unplug it first. I didn't remember to have towels ready when I pulled off the drain hose. that was a little messy, but easily remedied.
We had a break in the middle of the work to take the kids to a local pizza place that was doing a "Kids make it, we bake it" day where the kids got to make and eat their own pizza free if mom and Dad bought a meal. So we fed everyone for $20, and one of the other Toxic guys joined us with his wife and kids, so it was really fun.
Then back to the dishwashers. We put in and pulled back out the new dishwasher half a dozen times before everything was hooked up. It took 2 trips to WalMart for appliance extension cords (one for the cord, another for an outlet extender that made it possible to also plug in the disposal, since the appliance extension cord blocked the disposal outlet, which is wired specially to the disposal switch, so it couldn't be rearranged). Got it all in, plugged in the thing, turned on the water--and it leaked. So everything off again, I tightened the compression nuts on both ends of the copper tubing, and that stopped those leaks, but the place the copper tubing connects to the dishwasher also leaked--just a little, and only when the dishwasher is off--so I'm still trying to figure out what to do about that.
Unfortunately, the thing was coated with mineral deposits inside, which I wiped down with vinegar and scrubbed off.
They plugged the dishwasher drain.
So now I'm facing pulling the whole thing out again to clean all the inside components of mineral deposits.
What a pain!
Meanwhile the dishes are piling up.
Apparently you can keep the inside of the dishwasher clean in a hard water area by putting in a cup of vinegar with the dirty dishes once a week or so. Online "wisdom" also says you can put half a tub of Tang in, but the makers of the drink don't advise this. Other people say a packet of lemon Kool-Aid once a week where the soap goes (in an empty load) solves the problems. Any way you look at it, everyone agrees you have to throw in some acid every week or dishwashers here get really yucky.
I just want clean dishes. Is that too much to ask?
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