We’d been out to Lowe’s to pick up paint swatches and items for plumbing repair. It seems there is a slow leak in each of the toilet basins, and so there is the middle-of-the-night sound of water filling the tank. That’s an easy enough fix. In most houses.
At home, I fix one easily enough. Turn off the water, disconnect the feed line, pull up the old flapper and tug the new one into place. The water is hard enough to do serious damage to the rubberized flappers over time, and I suspect these are the originals.
I move on to the other restroom, pulling out the old flapper, putting in the new one and discover … there’s a little leak in the basin. Nothing that a little sealant can’t fix, hopefully. In most houses. The destructive burial ground spirits that live here have been well-documented.
But, between the hardware store and my temp-job as plumber there was a visit to the grocery store, where we did our best to avoid the four plodding teenagers who’d just walked in before us. [#middleage]
We buy our things from the list, noting with displeasure that they’ve moved the raisins and the trail mix, again. They do this every six weeks or so. It is like they get bored with the aisle arrangement and shuffle things around, just to make sure the stockers get their hours. Now, 90 percent of the time that you shop there you can’t help but be besieged by people asking if you need help, if you’re finding everything OK. The day after they reorganize these people are no where around. It is a little game they play.
But we finally find the raisins and the trail mix. Aisle 6, on the left. And we head up front to play our favorite game: Find the Fastest Line. I believe today we avoided cutting anyone off in getting to the right cashier. There was an older woman in front of us with nothing on the conveyer belt. A bagger had helpfully placed all of her things in plastic and back in her cart. The receipt had been given. And this lady would not stop talking.
We had about a third of our cart unloaded before she finally decided to head outside. (Clearly she had no ice cream.) The cashier rolls her eyes as loudly as a teenaged girl can. I snicker.
“Shut up,” she said with a smile. Kids these days, huh?
I said nothing.
This was the scene just before we started the grill this evening:
We had steaks and okra and lumpy mashed potatoes. Seems we broke the hand blender. And, no matter what you think, you’re not going to duplicate the speed of those beaters yourself.
We’re working our way through Dexter just now. I watched the first season on CBS a few years ago when they aired it during the writers’ strike. The show moved fairly slowly, and now I see why. The acting is a little stodgy and some of the dialog was written by a 13-year-old boy, but the camera angles and the writing are generally amusing. I don’t remember many specific details of this first season, only that the last episode had some amazing ending.
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