Direct Me To the Nearest Riverbank

Good morning!  I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend thus far!  Mine has been super glamorous, and I almost hesitate to tell you about it and make you all green with envy.  Bragging is just not pretty.

Luckily neither is this story.

My washing machine has started to be cranky.  I tried cleaning it out with baking soda and vinegar a few weeks ago, after my friend suggested it for getting rid of the “before” smell from the febreeze commercials.  She also suggested throwing Tang in there, which I did not try.  I think the Tang should have been a hint that she was kidding. Or wants to see me cry.  Because my machine hasn’t worked properly ever since then.

I think the real problem is that when I located the manual (properly filed away under the neglected basket of hand-washing that contains a sweater from when I was a teenager and my old band jacket), I realized that I was supposed to be running some Pure Clean cycle that I didn’t even know existed once a month, and also cleaning out the filter.

Hold the phone!

Now my washer has a filter?!  Who knew.

So it is quite likely that with missing 28 consecutive maintenance cycle, dirt was the only thing holding my machine together.  But I think the overall lesson here is that cleaning is devil’s work.

So after several cycles of doing this to drain the machine:

And digging around in the filter, and a moderate amount of cursing, we called the service dude.

Which meant I had to do something about this:

Now I took this picture when I was in the middle of cleaning up, so it looks much worse than it normally would.  (If you have actually been in my house and seen the laundry room when my husband and children didn’t heed my threats reminders to keep the door closed, and you know that’s just not true…please close the page and resist the urge to comment)  The shelves on the the left have kids’ craft stuff on them, and the shelf constantly walks itself out from the wall, spilling all of the supplies.  To be more accurate, spilling the glitter and feathers. Combined with the smell of death, my laundry room closely resembles a Vegas crime scene.

So I cleaned that room up at 10pm on a Friday.  And got up at that crack of dawn this morning to prepare for the repair dude’s vague “Saturday morning” arrival.  We all know how that goes.

He is also going to check out my oven.  It’s less than a year old, so under warranty still, but it burns everything on the bottom, and undercooks the rest of it.  Certain people in this house seem skeptical, as if that is how my cooking usually turns out anyway.  To this I vehemently object.  I am an excellent cook and will either burn the whole thing or serve it raw.  When I am giong to ruin dinner, I commit dammit!  Nothing half-assed for this housewife!

I feel like we have nothing but trouble with our appliances.  Do you have this problem?  When we moved in here 11 years ago, we bought all new appliances and had to have 3 of them fixed right away.  Should things work when you get them?  And if they do work, they should last longer than a year or 2 right?  Why is it that in the era of harvest gold and avocado green, those appliances would just not die, but now that they are white or stainless steel I can keep a goldfish alive for longer than my microwave?

Update: The appliance dude came and checked it all out.  The washer pump is stripped and needs replacing, and the oven temp is off by 60 degrees.  My apologies to anyone that I poisoned this year.  And a take-home lesson for you all:  your washing machine should not be the same brand as your husband’s cell phone or your television set.