Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/52934
A Series of Unfortunate Events by PITT DICKEY In 1797, our artistic pal Francisco de Goya made an etching he called The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. He was not referring to the Republican Presidential debates. Goya, like Nostradamus, was clairvoyant. More than 200 years ago, he predicted a tragic ending for our dishwasher in December 2011. Like Luca Brasi in The Godfather, our old washer sleeps with the fi shes. Goya's etching shows a guy tearfully slumped over what appears to be an 18th century dish washer. The dude is sleeping while a fl ock of creepy winged critters and large angry mammals hover around him in a distinctly unfriendly manner. I identify with the guy in the etching. Obviously his dishwasher has died. He is lost in a slough of despond and dirty dishes. He is going to have to hand wash his gruel soaked pots. The Horror. The Horror. After almost two decades of cheerful service, our dish washer gave up the ghost. It fell into the Big Sleep which predictably produced remodeling monsters in our kitchen. We had no warning of the washer's impending demise. One day it just wouldn't wake up. It died in its sleep. We called the repair wizard who determined it had a Do Not Resuscitate directive. The washer had been wired back in that unhappy technological window of time in the 1970s when people stopped using copper wire and switched to aluminum wiring. The good news then was that copper wire was expensive and aluminum was cheap. The bad news was that aluminum wiring tended to short out and burn down houses. Our good news was when our aluminum wiring shorted out, it just melted into a shiny puddle of metallic goo instead of catching fi re. Home improvements, like the Afghan and Iraqi wars, suffer mission creep. You can't just replace a dish washer without other things needing to be done. Remember the domino effect in Vietnam. Our entire kitchen was going to be over run by Viet Cong unless we made major renovations. Once the ugly camel of remodeling sticks its nose under the tent and into the kitchen, defi cit spending looms large on the horizon and blots out the sun. Our washer died right before the arrival of the Christmas piles of dirty plates. Recall the old Crosby, Stills, & Nash song, Francisco de Goya's Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. "Almost Cut My Hair" which featured the immortal Yuletide lyrics, "Must be because I had the fl u for Christmas/ And I'm not feeling up to par/ It increases my paranoia/ Like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car." The Remodeling Neocons were in our kitchen armed with mission creep. Our replacement washer was made by the same manufacturer at what we assumed was the same height. Naturally, it was too tall. The washer sat in the middle of Christmas and the kitchen fl oor. It had to be hooked up so we could use the sink. Otherwise we would have a fl ood. The counter tops had to be raised to allow our new baby to move from center stage. This meant installing new counter tops. Our new counter tops can now withstand a nuclear blast. Solid granite with just that touch of excess. They are delightful. Naturally the counter tops couldn't be installed until after New Years. We spent the 12 days of Christmas with the washer standing lonely like a cloud. The washer was usable but would tip over if you opened the door unless someone leaned on its top to keep it in place. Gravity is very consistent. Each time someone tried to open the door without a co-pilot to hold it down, it was Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Finally the counter tops arrived. The washer migrated from the middle of the fl oor to its new home. Hope sprang eternal that our long national nightmare of dishwasher hell was over. It wasn't. The granite installers put in a new sink but didn't hook it up. That meant another call to the plumber to connect the sink to its mysterious pipes. Sink fi nally in place, all seemed swell with the world. We took the washer out for a test fl ight. It rewarded us with soap bubbles creeping out the bottom of the door. Somewhere a seal was leaking. Alas, and yet another call to the appliance wizards for yet another service call. I now offi cially and proudly have dish pan hands. Somewhere Madge, the Palmolive manicurist, is smiling. PITT DICKEY, Contributing Writer, Up & Coming Weekly, COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM JANUARY 18-24, 2012 UCW 5