Fall back

Ooops I did it again.

I'm actually not a clumsy person, but you wouldn't know it from this post. Or this one. Subconsciously it may be because I believe in the rule of three more strongly than I thought, because this will be the third post I've done about me falling hard and flat on my back like a ton of bricks.

Fat, Jewish bricks.

Here's what happened.

I was minding my own business, doing award-winning, crowd-pleasing, results-getting, competition-killing, raise-worthy work at my bedroom desk for my 100% remote job with the world's leading cybersecurity company. In the course of that vitally important work, I make it a point to stay hydrated.

As one does.

Since it was just after noon, I started out to the kitchen to see if there was something good hiding out in the fridge for lunch. But before I got there, I turned around and went back to my desk to clear two water glasses (see hydration above) and put them in the dishwasher.

Are you with me so far? We're coming up on the part where the hardwood floor breaks my fall. And almost my back.

As I reached for the glasses, my very fashionable yet reasonably priced Vionic flip-flops got caught between the plastic desk chair mat and the area rug it overlaps. I started falling forward, water glasses in hand. Then I thought, let's see if I can put my early years as a danseur with the New York City Ballet to good use—if I turn, maybe I can slow my roll by grabbing the edge of the bed. The glasses went flying from my hands. I tried grabbing the bed and missed, which isn't easy cause that sucker is a two kids, two adults and two dog accommodating California King.

Thanks to the inertia, momentum, velocity and enormous amount of gravity at work, that giant thud you heard a little after noon PST today was me.

As luck—my luck—would have it, I was home alone: my daughter has a big time advertising job and had to go into her real office to work, and the wife had to take our German Shepherd Ace to the vet for some blood work. So I laid there a minute on the floor, my back screaming every swear word it knows at me, and tried to figure out how I was going to stand up.

The answer was fast. I sat up, grabbed the bed for leverage and got myself up off the floor. With that one move, it quickly became apparent my back wasn't going to be done swearing and screaming at me any time soon.

Just like my high school girlfriend.

Fortunately I had an acupuncture appointment this afternoon, so I managed to lower myself into my thirteen-year old Lexus ES350 (I really need a car with higher ground clearance) and went. And instead of working on my feet (long story, another post), he worked on my back.

It felt better for a little while afterwards. I don't know if it was physical or mental, but you can say that about most things with me.

So tonight, it's the heating pad on and off every twenty minutes, trying to keep the grunting sounds every time I move to a reasonable volume and not moving around too much. With any luck it'll start to feel better in the morning, and I'll be in for a quick recovery in the coming days.

Of course, the bad news is my Cirque du Soleil audition is off for now.

Breaking the code

Hard as it is to believe, there are actually many skills and talents I simply don’t have, or have been unable to master.

I can’t juggle.

I dance like everyone’s looking.

My artistic abilities are limited to drawing crooked straight lines.

I play the guitar badly, but at least it’s only three chords.

And when I sing, the dogs howl (in pain) at the moon.

But for all those things I can’t do, I can do one thing better than just about anyone you know: load a dishwasher.

In what can only be described as a freakishly Rain Man-esque talent, I can pack more into a dishwasher than you or my family would think possible. When someone else tries their dishpan hands at it, there’s usually still a pile of dirty dishes left in our fabulous, deep farmer sink we installed during the year of the remodel. I think because the sink is so deep, people who shall not be named feel it’s okay to leave a lot of dishes in there because at a casual glance, they’re out of view.

Anyway, then I have to go to the kitchen, rearrange the dishes in the dishwasher and fill up all that newfound space with the dishes in the sink.

The other skill I have is I know when dishes in the washer are dirty and when they’re clean. Apparently other members of my household do not possess the laser focus and McGyver-like resourcefulness that would let them suss that out.

After all, it would involve opening the dishwasher door and looking in. What are we, detectives?

So my son, in between his Hollywood moving and shaking, and wheelin’ and dealin’, came up with a code. It involves a magnet, with a design by Mike Mitchell (also a Mondo artist), that used to be on the trunk lid of his car before he sold it to Carmax.

The hand magnet takes its place of honor along with my Springsteen On Broadway magnet, and my wife's "I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." magnet.

The code is elegant in its simplicity: thumbs up for clean dishes, thumbs down for dirty dishes. And so far it's working like a charm.

The problem still remains that, for some reason, because I have this gift everyone expects me to do my precision loading of the dishwasher every night—even if I didn't participate in any way in dirtying the dishes. So I've developed a simple, easy to understand code of my own to let them know when I will and won't be their nightly clean up crew.

All I need to use it is a magnet with a different finger.

Back to bed. Again.

Sometime about three years ago, I posted this piece about my disdain for morning and almost everything related to it. I thought it might be a good time to revisit it because now, in this strange time, I can sleep in as late as I like and I'm able.

I have great admiration for all those working from home and maintaining their morning routines of early to rise, then getting dressed and ready for work so they look sharp and alert for their morning Zoom conference call.

I know we're all in this together, and I want you know I stand with you.

On everything but this part.

I am many things. Funny. Good looking. Talented. Creative. Compassionate. Encouraging. Well read. Kind to children. Nice to the waitstaff. A catch as a husband. Someone who loves doing laundry. And loading a dishwasher. A good friend. A trusted confidante. An excellent driver. A great kisser. And definitely humble.

However one thing I am not now, nor have I ever been, is a morning person.

Mornings are just a cruel tease. Being a late night person, I rarely get to sleep before midnight or one in the morning. I say sleep in the loosest sense of the word. It's been years, literally, since I've slept eight hours straight through. I get up to pee. Or I startle awake from a dream. Sometimes I'm just restless and watch some TV at three in the morning to take the edge off (because nothing takes the edge off like skin care and exercise equipment infomercials). Occasionally my eighty-five pound German Shepherd launches himself up on the bed in the middle of the night.

That gets the old ticker going.

Oddly enough, one thing that never, and I do mean never, keeps me awake is work. I think it comes from so many years as a freelancer. But the second both feet are out of the office, I don't think about anything related to work until I have to be back the next morning.

And we know how I feel about mornings.

The point of all this, and there is one, is that right around the time the faintest sliver of sunlight starts to hit the pitch black night sky is the exact moment I actually manage to get myself back to the deep, still sleep I've been craving all night. It finally arrives just in time for sunrise. Ironically when I'm finally completely out, it's time to wake up.

There's no gradual, gentle, coming-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-pool kind of awakening for me. Because I know how deep asleep I am in the morning, the alarm has to be more than a light bell, chirping birds or a digital alarm. No, my iPhone alarm is Uptown Funk. It comes on loud, and it's a straight up jolt out of bed. In fact, I have to kiss myself I'm so pretty (see what I did there?).

So if you see me at work in the morning around nine, dragging myself around, looking somewhat foggy and I don't return your smile or your hello, don't ask how you're doing or what you're working on, please don't take it personally. I promise I will.

Sometime around eleven.

Taking a stand

I've been a season subscriber to the Ahmanson Theater for many, many years. Before that, for over ten years I had fourth-row center season seats at the late, great Shubert Theater in Century City. I tried on the Pantages for a few seasons, and I took a couple seasons of the Geffen for a spin when I lived in Santa Monica.

There's a phenomenon I've noticed increasingly over the years, and while it happens in New York too, it seems particularly native to Los Angeles. After every performance, regardless of whether it merits it or not, the audience rewards the cast with a standing ovation. Instead of standing because a play has been filled with brilliant performances that moved you, or were cast with the perfect actors to play the roles, sometimes it feels like standing ovations have become the theater equivalent of participation trophies.

Now you might think you're way ahead of me here—and God knows it doesn't take much—in thinking I'm against the practice. The fact is I'm not.

Here's the thing: I was a theater arts major, and no one appreciates the blood, sweat and tears that go into getting a production off the ground more than I do. And while I realize not every play and performance is worthy of a standing ovation, I believe every performer is.

Actors aren't responsible for the material they're given. Their job is to commit to it, and bring the characters to life as best they can. For all the talk about what an easy job it is, it's incredibly difficult, and they don't always succeed. Remember the last time you tried to convince someone of something?

Admittedly sometimes it's gotten to the point where it feels like the seats are spring loaded. It'd be easy to think doing it for every play across the board cheapens the currency of genuine appreciation for the craft. But the thing about actors is they know in real time if something is working or not. They sense the room tone, they hear the feedback and they see the faces looking back at them. Yet even when it's going south, they're giving it their all.

If I'm being honest, and really, where's the percentage in that, I've given standing ovations to more productions that didn't deserve it than I care to admit. I also tip more than I should for mediocre service at restaurants, clean up for the housekeeper and rinse dishes before I put them in the dishwasher. I may have deeper issues, but that's not the point.

The truth is when the curtain comes down and the cast comes out, I want them to know I appreciate the effort they've made in the name of entertaining me.

That's what I stand for.

Getting lit

Contrary to what you may have been brought up to believe, it's what's on the outside that counts. At least when it comes to landscape lighting.

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time—and if you have, you might want to look into a Netflix subscription—you already know we went through a rather substantial remodel a couple years ago. If you'd care to refresh your memory about it, especially the parts where strangers marched through my house starting at sunrise, giant dumpsters blocked the street and the word "budget" lost all meaning, you can read up on it here, here and here.

While many great things came out of the remodel, like our new whisper-quiet Bosch dishwasher, a master bathroom that can accommodate (or is that a-commode-date?) more than one person at a time, about 50 sq. ft. more of living room and a bitchin' kitchen, one thing we unintentionally lost was our exterior lighting.

Since we were putting in a new electrical panel and circuit breakers, upping the amps (not that having circuits blow every time three appliances ran at the same time for 20 years wasn't fun) and rewiring the electrical, we also upgraded the outdoor lighting transformer. The one we had was over 20 years old, and the hamsters and hand crank that ran it were both getting worn out. So hello to a brand new, digital whammy-jammy transformer that immediately blew out the line to our existing exterior lights.

Even though we didn't let the fact we had no budget for many things during the process stop us, we literally had no budget left to fix the exterior lights. So for the past couple years, the only outside lights on the house have come from the inside. We do have plenty of overly sensitive sensor lights around, so if you come near the place they light up like Bret Kavanaugh at a frat party. But they're just a poor substitute for attractive, illuminating exterior light that increases the value of the house, says, "Hey, I see you out there." and makes the neighbors oooh and aaahhh at the place as they take their evening drives.

Right now I'm researching what seems like thousands of new fixtures on hundreds of web pages while our incredible electricians from the remodel are in standby mode. Hopefully I'll be able to flip the switch on the job soon.

I don't expect my house will look like the one in the top picture when it's done. But I'm hoping it'll at least look better than this one.

Throwing in the towel

There are a few things you should know about me if you don’t already. First is this: I don’t like what I don’t like, and I like what I like. (Chandler impression): Could it BE any simpler? I’m not complicated. At least not that way.

Next, and I think my current wife and every girlfriend I’ve ever had will back me up on this, I’m a catch. Especially when it comes to household chores like laundry and doing the dishes. You know, the ones everyone tries to avoid. While others are looking for an excuse not to, I charge head-first towards the dryer or the sink, ready to get the job done.

I’m the first responder of household chores.

Finally, in case you haven’t noticed, my personality might be best described as slightly compulsive. Exhibit A: Breaking Bad. Exhibits B, C and D: Springsteen, “my high school girlfriend” jokes, craps tables at the Venetian.

It’s no secret when I find something I like, I tend to go overboard with it. Which brings me to the Stonewall Kitchen dishtowels you see here. I love 'em.

Because one of the things on the long list of things I can’t stand is dishes in the sink—other things include paper straws, toilet paper from Trader Joe’s and whiny creative directors who haven't learned how to put the fun in dysfunctional—I wind up doing the dishes almost every night. And while a lot of that's just rinsing and putting them in our fabulous, whisper-quiet Bosch dishwasher, there’s also a considerable amount of hand-washing ones my wife calls "How many times do I have to say it—that cannot go in the dishwasher." To dry those, I can’t use just any dishtowel.

I need one that’s properly weighted. Thick enough to absorb, but not get water-logged. Not overdesigned with birds or flowers. One that retains its soft-to-the-touch feel before, during and after I'm done.

Stonewall Kitchen is that dishtowel.

I know what you're thinking: "Jeff's going on and on about a stupid dishtowel. He must be trying to get a bunch of them free from Stonewall Kitchen."

Frankly, I'm completely insulted you'd even entertain the idea that I'd stoop so low and be so obvious about doing something like that.

And I'll let you know when they get here.

Nice rack

One of the great joys remodeling the kitchen is paying the thousands of dollars in bills that seem like they'll be coming in for years after I'm dead. No, wait, that's not how I wanted to start this.

One of the great joys of remodeling is I get to pick out new appliances. There we go. And one of my best choices was our brand spanking new Bosch dishwasher.

Just to give you a little background, because I know you were hoping I would, our dishwasher is what started the entire kitchen remodel project. I won't get into all the gory details, because I already did that here. Suffice it to say eleven months and $20K over budget later, it was the right choice.

The Bosch is the third dishwasher we've had. The first that came with the house was a Westinghouse with a black door that clashed with the cabinets and counters. It sounded like a 747 taking off when it was running. So we replaced it with a snow white Maytag dishwasher, that was much quieter, went with the kitchen decor (such as it was) and worked fine for years.

Then one day, the handle broke when we tried to open it. We called a repair guy, who told us we could spend the money to get a new handle/door on it, or we could just use a dinner knife to unlock it by wedging it in and pushing down. Since we already had the knife, we decided to save the money. Besides, it felt a little McGyver-y and it was fun. At the beginning.

Soon after, we were unloading it again and the top rack broke its railings, almost crashing all the glassware in it to the linoleum floor. We could've had a nice down payment on a new dishwasher for what it would've cost to fix it, so for years we adapted to holding up the top rack with one hand, after we opened the door with the knife, and loading it with the other.

The McGyver-y part was starting to wear off.

Fast forward to the remodel. Now keep in mind it'd been years since I'd been appliance shopping, so it was a whole new world of dishwasher technology for me. I'm standing in the vast showroom at Friedman's Appliances, and our salesman—ask for Johnny—shows me the Bosch. I believe the sound I heard in that moment was the angels singing.

First of all, the Bosch is whisper quiet. So quiet in fact, if it weren't for that little red light I'd never know it's on.

Next, the controls are on the top of the door instead of the front. So whether it's running or not, it's just a slab of uncluttered, shiny, stainless steel sitting there looking beautiful (a skill I happen to know a little something about).

While those features were important, the final one that sealed the deal was when Johnny (ask for Johnny) showed me the third rack. I didn't know whether to cry or faint with happiness. After years of trying to figure out how to put soft plastic lid tops and smaller items in a place they wouldn't melt or fall through to the bottom, this opened up a whole new world for me.

I just read the last couple sentences and I'm thinking the same thing you are about my getting a life. But I digress.

The third rack could've been part of my immensely popular and often read What Took So Long series of posts. But because of the impact it continues to have on me, I thought it needed a post of its own.

If you've followed me on here for any length of time—and if you have you really should pay more attention to what's going on in the world around you, because it's not pretty—then you know I'm somewhat of a dishwasher savant. I look at the pile of disorganized dirty dishes, and in my head I see them all placed perfectly in the dishwasher. I've never used the "there isn't anymore room" excuse. There's always enough room if you do it right.

Judgmental much?

The third rack makes my life easier. Ask anyone that knows me—I'm all about easy. While it brings me joy every time I open the door, there's now an entirely new strategy to employ when I'm loading the dishes. The third rack has a spray spinner attached to the bottom of it, which means the items in the second rack have to be low enough to clear it. It's dishwasher Tetris figuring it out.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I've spent enough time rambling on about this.

Don't even get me started on the front-loading, full-size, stacked washer and dryer. That's for another day.

Back to bed

I am many things. Funny. Good looking. Talented. Creative. Compassionate. Encouraging. Well read. Kind to children. Nice to the waitstaff. A catch as a husband. Someone who loves doing laundry. And loading a dishwasher. A good friend. A trusted confidante. An excellent driver. A great kisser. And definitely humble.

However one thing I am not now, nor have I ever been, is a morning person.

Mornings are just a cruel tease. Being a late night person, I rarely get to sleep before midnight or one in the morning. I say sleep in the loosest sense of the word. It's been years, literally, since I've slept eight hours straight through. I get up to pee. Or I startle awake from a dream. Sometimes I'm just restless and watch some TV at three in the morning to take the edge off (because nothing takes the edge off like skin care and exercise equipment infomercials). Occasionally my eighty-five pound German Shepherd launches himself up on the bed in the middle of the night.

That gets the old ticker going.

Oddly enough, one thing that never, and I do mean never, keeps me awake is work. I think it comes from so many years as a freelancer. But the second both feet are out of the office, I don't think about anything related to work until I have to be back the next morning.

And we know how I feel about mornings.

The point of all this, and there is one, is that right around the time the faintest sliver of sunlight starts to hit the pitch black night sky is the exact moment I actually manage to get myself back to the deep, still sleep I've been craving all night. It finally arrives just in time for sunrise. Ironically when I'm finally completely out, it's time to wake up.

There's no gradual, gentle, coming-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-pool kind of awakening for me. Because I know how deep asleep I am in the morning, the alarm has to be more than a light bell, chirping birds or a digital alarm. No, my iPhone alarm is Uptown Funk. It comes on loud, and it's a straight up jolt out of bed. In fact, I have to kiss myself I'm so pretty (see what I did there?).

So if you see me at work in the morning around nine, dragging myself around, looking somewhat foggy and I don't return your smile or your hello, don't ask how you're doing or what you're working on, please don't take it personally. I promise I will.

Sometime around eleven.

Balancing act

As well as you know me, this won't come as any surprise.

There are the few rare and in between occasions where I can be what I suppose some people would call compulsive.

I prefer to think of it as laser focused.

For example, at the craps tables. Or getting Springsteen tickets to 47 shows on the tour. Say it with me: Breaking Bad.

But while those are just a few of the pleasurable pursuits I enjoy directing my compulsiveness...er...focus towards, there are other, more practical ways it expresses itself.

Laundry. I challenge you here and now to a towel, t-shirt and sock folding contest (I'm looking at you Carmen Dorr). Seriously, tread lightly and prepare for disappointment. Not only am I extremely good at it, I enjoy doing it. Which is why you don't stand a chance.

Are you the kind of person who thinks they've loaded a dishwasher to capacity, even though you still have a sink and a half full of dirty dishes? Step aside rookie. I'll reorganize your dishes in the washer, put in all the ones in the sink and still have room for that serving dish you were going to wash by hand. I'm like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind: I can see the dishes all in their proper place even before I've put the first one in.

There's one place more than all the rest where I'm relentless about making it work out exactly the way it should—balancing my checkbook.

It's an old school notion, but I still get paper bank statements. I like them. I can write the numbers on them, check off the line items as I reconcile them and easily backtrack if I need to. Almost every time, it balances to the penny, which brings me a kind of happiness few things do.

Occasionally though it's off by either a few cents, or a few hundred dollars. When that happens, I put on the green visor (figuratively-green isn't really my color) and go through my find-my-mistake ritual.

First up is checking the addition in my checkbook register. I know there are apps for that, but I like doing it. I'm Columbo on a case to find the missing pennies ("Excuse me, just one more thing..."). If that doesn't solve it, I start adding the outstanding checks and uncredited deposits. Sometimes it's a few minutes, rarely it's a few hours. But I never give up, and eventually I find the error. And I always wind up with a balanced checkbook for the month.

I know I could get online statements and do it all from my laptop. But it wouldn't give me the same feeling of accomplishment putting pen to paper and figuring it out does.

I could go on and on about the joys of checkbook balancing, but I Love Lucy will be on soon and I have to go warm up the picture tube and find my clicker.

More power to me

There are a lot of powers I'd like to have.

I'd like to be able to fly like Superman. It'd get me where I need to go a lot faster, I wouldn't have to deal with those pesky TSA people, and I look absolutely fabulous in a cape.

Or so I've been told.

Invisibility would also be a good one, being able to move through the world unnoticed (of course I could accomplish the same thing by having a show on NBC), slipping into places unseen by anyone. This is definitely a power I would've put to much better use in high school. Now I think I'd use it mostly to get around taking out the trash and unloading the dishwasher. "Where's dad? He was here a minute ago."

Telekinesis is a favorite. I'd love to be able to have a driver flip me off on the freeway, then be able to flip them off the road by sending their car over the side rail just by thinking about it. Seems fair.

Sadly, I don't have any of those powers. The one I will have shortly is one I hope I never have to use. Power of attorney over my son's health and affairs.

As you might know, young Mr. Spielberg is going to one of the finest film schools in the country. That's the good news. The bad news, besides the tuition, is it's not in the same state as I am. So just like my weight, taxes and where my next gig is coming from, I file this power under things I don't want to think about but have to.

My boy will be a two and a half hour flight away, and that's provided the planes are leaving when I need to go. God forbid if something should happen where he's unable to make decisions for himself, either myself or my wife are going to have to make them for him. No parent ever wants to think about this. But the only thing worse than it actually occurring is not being able to do anything about it. I asked him to grant my wife and I power of attorney, and he'll have to sign documents giving it to us. As I was stumbling around trying to explain it to him, he took the opportunity to explain it to me: "It's like a fire extinguisher. You never want to use it, but it's good to have around if you need it."

Clearly he's already much more mature than I ever was at his age. Or even my age.

I'm taking this as a learning opportunity for both of us. I get to teach him to read this document - all documents - carefully before he signs them. He gets to teach me he's a capable, grown man - something I sometimes have trouble remembering (and realizing).

I finally understand why parents treat you as kids no matter how old you get. He's always going to be my baby boy no matter what state he's in or how old he is.

The other thing the wife and I are forced to consider is that plane ride I was talking about. If events were moving fast, there's the very real possibility we wouldn't be able to reach him before decisions needed to get made.

Fortunately, I have a great friend named Cameron who lives in the city where he'll be. He's graciously offered to be my son's boots on the ground while we're not there, and not just for emergency situations but for homecooked meals, advice and anything else he needs as well. Cameron's included in the legal document as the alternate after the wife and I, so there won't be any question about his authority should it ever come to that. I'll never be able to convey how much of a relief it is knowing he's there for my son, or how thankful the wife and I are.

So tomorrow morning, we sit down with our lawyer and he'll sign the papers. And I'll try not to think about what they actually mean.

I guess that is one more power I have. The power of denial.

The big dipper

The photo is slightly misleading since this post is about my kitchen floor, and not a giant sinkhole. But if I don't do something about it soon, it could wind up like that.

When we first bought our house, we did the traditional walk-through before we closed. That's the part of the transaction where you notice all the little things that are wrong you didn't notice before, and the sellers - along with their mother who's acting as their real estate agent - tell you why it's not really a problem so they can close the deal and move on to their next home in Newport Beach. Then you take them to arbitration for trying to pull the wool over your eyes, and you get a judgement in your favor for $10K. How you like me now Duleep and Jamie?!

I may be getting off point here.

Anyway, during the walk through I noticed a small, shallow, hardly worth mentioning little dip in the kitchen floor just in front of the dishwasher. I wasn't even sure I'd felt it, and no, I won't be using the high school girlfriend joke here.

Fast forward sixteen years later, and that dip in the floor is now a small canyon.

We don't know whether to fix it or add a viewing platform.

We're leaning towards fixing it.

The problem is, our house was built in 1949, and the kitchen floor is tiled with linoleum. So, one thing leads to another. If we're going to fix the dip in the floor, we have to tear up the linoleum to do it. Which means not only do we repair the subfloor, but we put in a new floor over it. Also, we've been planning to remodel the kitchen since we've lived here, so it would only make sense to do all the cabinets and appliances first and then tear up the floor.

That dip is slowly turning into a money pit.

We haven't decided exactly what to do yet or how much we want to spend on it. We do know we're in a race against time, because we're only probably a couple months away from someone stepping through the floor and being hip deep in linoleum.

It'll probably be me since I'm the one who loads the dishwasher all the time. It's not because I want to. It's because, and I'm not bragging here, I'm a dishwasher savant. I know how to maximize the space. It's like that movie A Beautiful Mind, except in my version, instead of seeing equations in the air John Nash sees how all the dishes fit in the racks.

I know the entire family will be happy once the kitchen is done. It's really the last problem we have with the house. Then, we can all sit back and enjoy this house the way we've wanted to since we moved in.

Besides, I'm sure the lights blowing out when we run the washer, dryer and dishwasher at the same is fairly common.

Brain freeze

They look so nice don't they? Like big, chilly robots lined up just waiting to be filled with boxes of frozen food from Trader Joe's.

Our thirteen year old Frigidaire refrigerator is on its last legs (last rollers?). While it still keeps things cold, you can feel a nice chill standing in front of it because the seal on the door isn't nearly as tight as it used to be.

But then whose is?

There's also a handle missing, no doubt from years of the kids hanging from it. It's a lot noisier than it used to be (aren't we all). And because it's so old, it's whatever the opposite of energy efficient is. Whenever its motor kicks on, the lights dim throughout the house and we can actually hear the electric bill going up.

So this past weekend, since it was raining anyway, the family and I had a fun-filled afternoon walking around Howard's looking for a new fridge.

On the logo it says "Nobody Beats Howard's." I'm not sure if that means price. Or selection. Or service. Or just confusing the crap out of someone who hasn't had to think about it in years. If it means that last one, then it's definitely truth in advertising.

When we bought our current fridge thirteen years ago, it was around $800. Needless to say I was in for a little sticker shock. Apparently the cost of materials, design, new refrigerator technology and all those white plastic vegetable drawers has skyrocketed.

After opening and closing more doors and drawers than I could count, the one we zeroed in on came in at $2299 after the energy rebate. (I was going to make a joke about Doors & Drawers being a washed up country music group. But actually it's a company that makes, well, guess. Though I'm not sure they get much business with a website that looks like this).

But I digress.

I have to admit I was intrigued by the French Door model with the extra crisper drawer. Four handles, four things to open and four things to break for those of you keeping count.

The crisper drawer between the fridge on top and the freezer on the bottom doesn't actually give us any more room than the two drawers that do the same job in our fridge now.

But it looks way bitchin'. And it had a decal that said, "Fresh Food on a whole new level."

Copywriters.

And it was a Maytag. Which as you can see by the sticker in the upper right corner is made with "American Pride."

Howard's has been selling appliances for a very long time. In fact we bought our current fridge, washer, dryer and dishwasher there. They're local, knowledgeable and can usually deliver and install on the same day.

So far be it from me to tell them how to do their job. Obviously they know the best way to display refrigerators on the showroom floor.

Apparently, tons of blinding neon lights reflecting off a roomful of white and stainless steel refrigerators are an essential part of the purchase decision-making process.

We wound up not buying a fridge that day. Instead, we came home and spent some quality time with our failing fridge. We discussed how if you take an extra minute to press the door closed tight, it actually sealed okay. And that despite being down a handle, we really didn't have any trouble opening it. There was no getting around the fact it wastes a lot of electricity. But we own a Land Cruiser. Wasteful is something we're used to.

Then we looked at pictures of all the refrigerators we'd just seen, and spent some time talking about what would look best inside our house.

We decided it was the $2299.

It's showering money

There are shower people and there are bath people. For the most part, all of us here at the Ponderosa are shower people. That's because not only is it easy to take a shower, it's easy to take a shower for granted.

Right up until something goes wrong.

Back in June my wife opened a door to a closet in the back of the house that we don't use very often. When she did, not only was she hit with a musty, mildewy smell, she also stepped onto a soaking wet carpet that made a very unpleasant squishing sound. She yelled to me down the hall, "Do you know where this water is coming from?" I replied, "Narnia?"

Sometimes she doesn't think I'm so funny.

Now I'm no stranger to household flooding. I've had experience with it before. Which is why I was able to figure out the problem was the shower in my son's bathroom on the other side of the closet wall.

I immediately leapt into action to fix the problem by grabbing the one indispensable tool every Jew is a master at. The telephone.

I called the plumber.

It didn't take long for him to figure out it was a cracked shower pan. And judging by the damage, it'd been cracked for a long while (I told you we don't use that closet often).

So the first order of business was to dry out everything back there: the walls, the items in the closet and the carpet. The good news is I found out there are people for that.

The Servpro team stormed our house like the beaches at Normandy, and came in with four giant fans that sounded like a 747 taking off, plus three giant dehumidifiers. We had to close off the back part of the house for four days while all of them ran 24/7.

That is until the circuits blew.

Our house was built in 1949, and the wiring has always been a little sketchy. If we run the washer, dryer and dishwasher at the same time the circuit blows. Sure, we could rewire the place so the electrical load is more evenly distributed. But where's the fun in that?

Besides, resetting the circuits is one thing I actually know how to do.

The next thing was to call my insurance company and have a very long, unrewarding conversation with my agent. Here's the funny part: if this had been a sudden accident - like a pipe bursting and flooding the place - we would've been covered. But since this was a cracked shower pan, they wouldn't cover the repair, although they would cover the water damage.

So I was happy about that, at least until I found out how much our deductible is.

Seems in my attempt to be a shrewd negotiator, and let State Farm know exactly who they were dealing with, I tried to save a few bucks on my homeowner's policy. Somewhere along the line I said okay to a $5,000 deductible. Which is not a bad thing if you have $50,000 in damage. We weren't even close.

Also turns out there are two ways to replace a shower pan. The cheap way, and the right way, which as you'd expect costs considerably more.

Guess which one we went for?
Of course when you're involved in any kind of big home project, one thing inevitably leads to another. Since we're also replacing the tile floor, we had to take out the vanity - the cabinet and sink - to get to the tile underneath. If there was a cheap and wrong way to do it, that's how the former owners of this house did it. The vanity is no exception. When the contractor went to remove it, it literally crumbled.

So last night the family and I had a romantic evening at Lowe's plumbing and bathroom section, picking out a new vanity. And moving ever closer to our deductible.

Anyway, enough about this. Suffice it to say at the end of it all, my son will have an awesome, newly tiled bathroom with an updated vanity. And he'll be able to enjoy his newly subway tiled, leak-proof shower.

The same shower it turns out I'm going to take a bath on.