Gratitude Monday: clean dishes

My dishwasher stopped draining last week—well, it drained, but not completely. I did everything YouTube told me to do: cleaned the glass trap and the filter, scunged out with baking soda and white vinegar, unhooked and cleaned the drain from the garbage disposer. Nada. 

The next YouTube step involved pulling the machine away from the wall and messing around underneath it, so I reckoned it was time to call in the pros.

Only it turns out that, in this the year of COVID, everyone’s appliances are breaking down, and appliance repairmen are booked up weeks in advance. Thursday morning, I got an appointment for 1 December from one company, but I called the last name on my list and struck lucky: they’d had a consolation, and the guy could be at my place between 1100 and 1400.

Well, let me say, that in two days of not having a dishwasher, I had quite the stack of dirty dishes piling up on my stovetop, so I was just elated.

He did come out, vindicated that everything I’d done was the right thing, but it just wasn’t the problem, so he pulled out the machine from the wall and started messing around underneath. Pump was working, but clearly not all the water was getting through the other end. So he pulled off the drain hose as the culprit. He tried without luck to clear the hose, but ended up replacing it instead.

Let me just say that I found the whole experience worth the $180 it cost me. I got the most interesting history about how he came to repair appliances (being able to fix lawnmowers in high school got him a job doing same at Sears in Bailey’s Crossroads; that morphed into fixing appliances—which you can do year round, unlike lawnmowers—and here we are, nearly 30 years later), and also a couple of recommendations for small restaurants around town.

And—my dishwasher is back in service, which is a massive relief. I understand this is decidedly a first world problem, but I’m grateful all the same. (Yes, I've cancelled the appointment for 1 December; I am not a jerk.)

Also—Cadet Bonespurs is failing at every attempt to subvert the election. That’s a big, big load of gratitude.