Dishwashers and Dings: Adulting Isn’t Worth the Worry

When I returned from my bike tour I planned every day to include reading, working out, bicycling or hiking, learning guitar, meditating, listening to a podcast or watching a movie, and doing one adult thing. I had to swap physical therapy for guitar plucking because fretting the guitar was messing up the already problematic nerves in my left arm. Lately, I have been slacking at adulting. I didn’t do the paperwork for getting Irish citizenship, for example. And I haven’t dealt with the window ding in the windshield of one of our cars. (It’s small but it’s right smack dab in the driver’s line of sight.)

My planned adult activity today was to shovel snow. Mrs. RC did a round of shoveling while I was eating breakfast. The forecast called for snow all day so I was expecting to go outside and shovel in the late afternoon. I spent the early part of the day listening to a podcast, doing my back exercises, and watching a spring training baseball game. The anticipated snow never actually accumulated, because of warmer temperatures so I decided to ride my bike in the basement.

I was about 50 minutes into my ride when I felt a wet sensation on my left ankle. I thought it was another random nerve pain from my blood thinners. Then I felt another sensation. I stopped and looked up. The basement ceiling (actually the kitchen subfloor) was dripping water. Our 21 year old dishwasher had sprung a leak.

So I turned it off. I arrayed a bunch of pails and buckets under the drips and called a plumber. Two hours later the plumber called back and said that plumbers don’t do appliances, appliance repair people do. So I called the one he recommended and washed and dried the dishes in the dishwasher.

Now it turns out that a dishwasher is only supposed to last about 10 years. So I think I will go dishwasher shopping after my physical therapy appointment tomorrow. Of course, the options are absurdly numerous. And I am the world’s most incompetent consumer. I have a hard time buying furniture and lamps and such. (We still don’t have any deck furniture six and a half years after replacing our deck.)

I keep reminding my self that these latest irritating bits of life are pretty small potatoes. In the last 2 years I’ve been hit by an SUV, hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance at 3 a.m. with chest pains, nearly run over by a dump truck, and knocked down for a standing eight count with pulmonary embolisms and a collapsed lung. I’m a slacker compared to Mrs. Rootchopper. She was run over by an SUV and had salivary cancer, both in the last five or six years.

Dishwashers and car windshield dings somehow don’t make the cut anymore as things to lose sleep over. So we’ll do the grown up thing and deal with them. Like adults.