Happy Anniversary To Us....Continued

The installer called on Tuesday, our anniversary, to schedule a time to come out and deal with our dishwasher situation. I was very excited to tell them that Wednesday between 10:00 and 2:00 sounded perfect to me and please, oh please, oh please come rescue me from handwashing my dishes and God bless them and their families and their mechanical know-how, while we are on the subject. And when the installer called at 11:30 on Wednesday to ask if it was still a good time to deliver and install my new "Symbol of Love and Commitment," I am not ashamed to confess that I squeed a little bit. Needless to say, I was anxiously anticipating taking ownership of the latest reason my credit card is maxed.

So I imagine it should come as no surprise that when Mr. Fix-It got under my sink to start preparing to remove the old dishwasher and install the new one, he found that it was not going to be that easy. No, it wasn't going to be easy at all. Because one of the valves under the sink was corroded and was likely to spring one very large leak or several smaller leaks if he attempted to install our dishwasher without first replacing the valve. He said he could replace it for me, but it would cost me an extra $75 for labor and an extra $30 for parts, and since it was such a quick fix, he would just as soon see us save the money than pay him for it.

Now, you remember what I said about how "no matter how simple the project seems, or how easy a professional makes it look to do, any home improvement project you undertake yourself will end up taking three times as long as you think it will and will eventually result in you having to learn new languages to curse in, having completely exhausted your vocabulary of epithets in your native language?" Well, that's great that you remember, because I managed to completely forget that I said those words when Mr. Fix-It offered to save us some money by letting Oscar repair the valve.

The valve was not, in fact, a quick fix. Instead, the valve took several hours to fix and involved quite a bit of Oscar grumbling. And it also resulted in another water line under the sink springing a leak, which meant that Oscar had to make another trip to Lowes first thing the next morning. Meanwhile, my pretty, pretty new Symbol sat forlornly in the garage, having been delivered, but not lovingly placed in the comfort of my kitchen.

But hey, the valve was repaired, another water line was repaired and we were ready to go. I called Mr. Fix-It to reschedule my installation. He didn't call back. I waited patiently. He still didn't call back. I called again. I waited not quite as patiently. And when I still hadn't heard from Mr. Fix-It by the close of business and I found myself with a counter completely covered with a new set of dirty dishes, I resigned myself to another hour of handwashing. I was not amused.

I had too much going on this morning to bother calling Mr. Fix-It again, so it was a good thing he called me. He wanted to know if he could come by this afternoon to install my washer. Of COURSE he wanted to come by this afternoon. I had already committed to Snark's Mistress that I would help her with some errands. Luckily for me, he didn't anticipate being available until between 3:00 and 4:00 and I was pretty sure our errands would be done by then. So we agreed to keep in touch during the day and if it was at all possible to install today, he would install today.

Well, we kept in touch all right, but I quickly got the impression that the installation was not going to happen tonight. I called him a little after 3:30 to let him know I was home and he could come by at any time. He called at 4:00 to say that he had another installation before he could get to me and he would call me back. He called again at 4:45 and said he was finishing up the installation as we spoke, but he was worried because he stayed home yesterday because he was sick and he was starting to feel lousy again, and he knew we have a little guy and he didn't want to get him sick and it was getting cold outside, but maybe he could come home, since he doesn't live far from us, and grab a sweatshirt and then come over and do our install, but maybe he should wait until he feels better because he wanted to do the best job possible so he wanted to be feeling best when he did finally install it.

By that point, I just wanted to kill myself. Maybe I should have. Of course, if I had, I would have missed the gloriousness of having Mr. Fix-It calling a half hour later to say that he was just going to run home to grab a sweatshirt and then he'd be at my house, installing my dishwasher. So, you know, long story short (heh...like THAT happens around here), my dishwasher got installed today, a week after the old one broke. May I never have to hand wash a table full of dishes again. Happy Anniversary to me, once again.