And now the backup dishwasher is busted too*

Why does buying stuff always feel so good? Why do I feel all clean and purposeful when I decide, "Yes. We need this," and click SUBMIT?

Yesterday the new washing machine arrived. It's High Efficiency. It loads from the front. It surveys the basement with a dark and all-seeing eye. It spins at speeds exceeding, as far as I can calculate... let's see here, angular velocity equals 2π revs/second, multiply that by the radius of the drum to get tangential velocity...
hmm...
(0.33 meters)((1150revs/min x (2π rad/sec))/60) = 39.72 meters/second

Yes. Just as I thought. It spins at speeds exceeding 88.85 miles per hour. It's totally that girl in that Cake song.

(And if you think I did THAT without the help of Old Man Internet, you can hire me to amortize your student loan.)

A month ago the beautiful living room rug that sheds worse than all three of Molly's big black dogs on a hot sunny day, the rug we HAD to buy because of the late unlamented kidney-afflicted St John Bosco, arrived and made our living room look like something out of a magazine.




And two weeks ago our friend Rich installed (oh crap that reminds me we still owe Rich money) a new bathroom vanity to replace the one that fell apart like Herbie in The Love Bug.

Just now I committed to buying stilts so I can walk with Molly again in the Lauraville Fair parade. Last year I borrowed stilts from Body Lotion John, but I broke them when I fell.

But it's not the owning, I swear. It's the feeling when you buy it. For me, it's like shucking off the past - moving forward without the broken baggage that I've been lugging through the train station the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

OHHH, I felt good when I finally decided to buy my Nikon SLR. It was like trying to make the decision had been needling me and bugging me, and once the decision was made, those bees stopped buzzing in my brain.

I am by nature a little impetuous. Impatient. I become so aggravated by 'process' that I will act a bit rashly to make the process stop. "FINE! Let's just get this one!" might be my motto. I hate seeing myself dither. Luckily, I'm also a librarian, so I am always armed with metrics and benchmarks, ratings and pricing, when I am standing on the car lot looking at two different minivans and shifting from foot to foot in frustration. DOES THE BLUE ONE HAVE THE SLIDING MIDDLE SEATS? FINE. LET'S JUST BUY IT AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

This weekend, gentled into it by a buy-now-pay-next-October deal at Sears, we bought a new dishwasher, after five years of dealing with the oldest, loudest, tiltiest and most particular dishwasher that still functioned as such, and three days of dealing with the oldest, loudest, tiltiest and most particular dishwasher that NO LONGER functioned as such. As soon as we pulled that trigger, the clouds cleared and I could see flat seas and gently waving palms, and there was Johnny Depp handing me a bottle of rum, welcoming me to the Caribbean.

Seriously, Johnny Depp, right there at the Sears Scratch 'n' Dent on York Road.

*that means my husband is on crutches