There's a Reason We Rarely Do Dishes

We bid farewell yesterday morning to our dear friend Mary, who had spent almost three whole days at the Stick Farm.

Whatever muscles I use for laughing are well exercised when Mary is around. She got me going immediately when I told her she would have to accompany me to a parent-teacher event at Katie's high school and she created the character "Aunty Pepper" on the spot. Aunty Pepper would not go alone, of course, so "Uncle Salt" was enlisted (see my Facebook profile pic). We then decided we'd introduce Aunty Pepper as a mute, so she wouldn't have to actually say anything to Katie's teachers Mary's miming of "I'm mute" was priceless and very nearly incapacitated me.

Mary's a very easy guest. She just parks her van in the yard and voila, there's her bedroom. We brought her a steaming gallon of coffee every morning, and that's pretty much all she required. Plus, she practically took over my kitchen, where, despite our best efforts and I'm sure to Mary's well-tempered disgust, at least one of our shih tzus has decided to relieve herself on an irregular albeit fairly frequent basis.

Feeding people has never been my strong point -- Rex has been my rock in that regard as we raised Katie, once breast-feeding ended. I was really good at breast-feeding, but good hostesses offer other options. Luckily, Rex was available to grill pork chops one evening, and the next night Mary tossed us a mean salad. Lunches at our little Limerick cafe and a riverside restaurant in Kennebunkport filled in the gaps,

Anyway, today, about 24 hours after Mary left, it occurs to me that she must be wondering why I didn't once turn on the dishwasher whilst she sojourned. To my credit, I did rinse dishes and put them in the dishwasher. But here, dear reader, is the reason I did not push the Start button:

Our $25 Craigslist dishwasher makes so much noise, we literally only start it when we are on our way out to somewhere. And I mean, one foot out the door. I actually made a recording of it on my phone, and if it's still on my phone, I will upload it soon. Stay tuned! 

It's Probably Something I Did

One of my very first jobs was sewing swatches of upholstery at a furniture factory. An older girl (she was 19, I was 18) named Debbie Wiley and I were hired for six weeks at the end of the summer. Our boss was named Irvin. Very nice guy. Old (40?) but nice.  We had to punch in and out of work, standing in line with our grown-up co-workers, who, we were to discover, behaved more like elementary school children most of the time. Here's one example: a couple of the women were giggling one day because one of them had given a jointly disliked co-worker a piece of candy that had, unbeknownst to her, been dropped on the floor! Ha ha! What a hoot!

A couple days into the six weeks, my sewing machine broke down. Irvin called in a repair guy, and I stood around waiting for it to be fixed. You may think it's boring to sew swatches, but it's much more boring to hang around a factory floor with nothing to do except watch juvenile-acting grown-ups. Soon, the machine was fixed, and I was back busily whipping up upholstery samples to be displayed in furniture retail stores across the Northeast.

My sewing machine broke down a bunch more times, and we went through the repair process each time. Irvin was scratching his head, concerned about how much it was costing the company.

Finally, all on my own, I figured out what was wrong with my machine. It was me. It was breaking down because I was using it incorrectly. Can't tell you now whether I was threading it wrong or replacing the bobbin incorrectly, but I did figure it out, and stopped doing whatever I was doing. The machine did not break down again.

 I let Irvin think the repairman had finally succeeded. I feared if he knew it was my fault, he'd dock my pay for the amount of the repairs.

This was not an isolated situation in my life. In the course of numerous jobs and execution of many tasks, I learned that if some piece of machinery malfunctioned, it was probably something I did. As my husband, Rex, would say, "Loose nut behind the wheel."

This is why I am so relieved I had nothing to do with the "State Trooper was a Heroin Addict" story in the newspaper I work at that turned out to be a lie.

Lying to the press

The top editor at the newspaper where I work told me that one of my headlines was his "second-least-favorite in the paper last week."

Admittedly, the headline sucked. It was: "Avian flu flies the coop, but industry still lays an egg."

Bad. I laid an egg.

The poorness of my performance paled, however, when the newspaper suffered an even bigger embarrassment. We ran a huge front page story Sunday about a former state trooper (22 years, he said) who came forward to share his shocking tale of being a heroin addict. Turned out he wasn't a former state trooper. He was barely even a former cop: Eight months on the South Paris police force. Part time.

My suggested headline:

'Trooper' lies
to reporter;
newspaper
lays big egg

The good news about the story, and I am positively giddy about this, is that I had absolutely NOTHING to do with it! Usually when something goes wrong, my fingerprints turn up somewhere in the history. Not this time.

(I remain, of course, intensely curious about what his first-least-favorite headline was.)