In the second grade, I started biting my nails because I saw a few of the popular kids in my class doing it. So clearly doing it was going to make me popular. Luckily by the third grade, I realized that doing what the popular kids were doing was a fast track to t-r-o-u-b-l-e and never really mimicked their actions again. But that awful nail biting habit stuck with me for 19 years. It took pricey weekly manicures and reading a swine-flu related article about how many germs reside in your nails to make me stop (though I do relapse from time-to-time in stressful moments).
But habits are so easy to acquire and so hard to break. And when I do break them, I get sooo OCD about them. Case in point: I have no idea how it started but I fell into this awful habit of leaving my dirty dishes in the sink instead of putting them immediately in the dishwasher. Given that my dishwasher is so close to my sink that I do not even need to move my feet to complete the action, there was absolutely no excuse for not doing it.
One day I realized what I was doing and how ridiculous it was and vowed to break the habit. In my typical OCD way, I took it way over-the-top. If I even left a dish in the sink for a second, I could not think about anything else. I immediately had to stop what I was doing and put it in the dishwasher.
This habit-breaking habit came to a screeching halt last weekend when after after running my full dishwasher, I discovered that something was very very wrong with the plumbing. Yes, two weeks after my toilet plumbing went awry so did my kitchen plumbing. Sometime in the recent past, I apparently angered the plumbing Gods.
After my attempt to “fix” the dishwasher, which, let’s face it, was me standing there yelling “I HATE D.C.”, unloading the machine into the sink, and running the machine with a dishwasher cleaner in it, I called my landlord who promptly came over. I had a day of baking Whoopie Pies ahead of me and this was putting me behind schedule. My landlord, who I adore, has mechanical skills that rival mine so the two of us stood there and stared and I grew more and more frustrated as I stared at the heap of dishes in my sink. I was almost in tears.
My landlord then tentatively asked me, “Uh, you do know how to wash dishes by hand, right?” Um, perhaps, my high-maintenance princess-y tendencies are a little too obvious. But yes, I did, in fact, grow up in a house without a dishwasher. To quote my mom and dad, “Why do we need a dishwasher, we have five of them living here.” Those five being me and my sisters. So I have washed a dish or two in my day. So I set about washing the dishes by hand as my landlord contacted the plumber.
Then as he was leaving, my landlord mentioned that he had been in an awful car accident the day before and I felt like the crappiest person on the planet for bemoaning my dishwasher scenario. This is the second time in a week that I have been whining about something petty and the person I was talking to brought me back to reality with a truly awful thing that had happened to them. Note to self: quit being so dramatic.
But I am clearly not ready to break the drama habit as this was my really dramatic way of saying there will be no Whoopie Pie Wednesday this week. My kitchen was in tatters and my OCD clean sink tendencies could not handle the pile of dishes associated with baking.
I have high hopes for the return of Whoopie Pie Wednesday NEXT week but the plumbing situation is not quite resolved. The temporary fix has me pouring bleach down the sink drain at regular intervals and trying not to think about the environmental impact of that. After consulting many, many experts, my landlord was finally able to identify the issue and a special plumber is coming this Sunday. The word “bypass” has been mentioned. It doesn’t sound good. .
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