The Great Baked Bean Disaster of 2007

It’s statistically inevitable. When you’re expecting a house guest, things fall apart. It started when I was cleaning the bathroom, which serves as the guest bathroom, also known as my bathroom (because I live with two males with somewhat spotty aim.) While removing the shower hand-held thing to spray the cleaner from the tub, it slipped from my hand and crashed into the ceramic soap dish – you know the kind that’s built into the wall. It fell off the wall and crashed into the tub, shattering into a handful of chunks and dinging the porcelain of the tub. I just stood there staring. The Kid wanders in and pats me solicitously on the belly and says, “It’s okay, Mama.”

Okay. My mom arrives and I explain the now exposed hole on the wall above the tub. We laugh about the whole thing. I take pictures and then don’t upload them because suddenly my tiny little bathroom looks dingy and sad. Vow to redo the tub. Move on.

Next, we decide to have a big dinner. We cook a ham and make potato salad. No, my mom makes potato salad because hers is awesome and my potato salad is a mere shadow of the brilliance of her potato salad. Really, even if she walks me through every single step, hers is still much much better than mine. My special contribution is going to be baked beans. I’ve found a recipe that I think will duplicate the baked beans I made when my sister was living with me. Those beans were so yummy that she ate a lot of them. She ate so many of those beans she actually threw up. True story. I spend all day long talking about my yummy yummy beans. The beans were awful. The Kid ate one single bean and made a particularly dramatic face. Lefty and my mom ate some but we all agreed they were not quite as soft as we wanted and no one used the word yummy at all. Undeterred, I cooked them some more after dinner and they just got further and further away from yummy. In defeat, I throw the beans away. Vow to try a different recipe (perhaps a can of Bush’s Baked Beans) next time. Laugh heartily at myself. Move on.

Later that evening, I’m moving clothes from the washer to the dryer. Push the button on the dryer and it begins to make a horrific scary movie kind of grinding sound. Open the door, grinding stops. Turn it on, more grinding. We find hangers and drape wet clothes on every available surface. This is our after dinner entertainment. Spend the rest of the evening discussing repair vs. buying a new dryer. This conversation continues in my head for most of the night. Decide to buy a new dryer. Move on.

And here’s the funny part, next day I’m talking on the phone to my sister in Oregon and I asked her to listen to my dryer grind because I think it’s fun to try and make people listen to my ailing appliances. I press the button and the dryer starts, no grinding and no grinding since then. So my sister fixed my dryer telepathically over the phone. She’s amazing.