I'll Just Do Them By Hand

I'll be the first to admit I don't have much talent for spatial visualization. I park my car using audible data from the curb. I routinely look at something bigger than my head and think "I can eat that." Also? Your dishwasher doesn't make any sense to me. I don't care who you are.

There's a section on the IQ tests where they show you a shape in two dimensions and you have to figure out what it would look like folded up. I can't do that. I can't tell if it will be a box, a swan, or a dreidel. If it weren't for the verbal comprehension part of the test I would've been institutionalized. I used to try to cut out shapes to sew my own stuffed animals and they all came out sad and flat. It was like I had a nice store-bought collection of animals and a separate roadkill set.

But your dishwasher doesn't make sense. There can't be that many dishwashers on the market. No two are alike, except that there's no figuring them out. I know what to do with my own, now. I'm sure it didn't make sense at first either, but after a while, you figure out what goes where from experience. If you load the plates here, there's no place for the bowls. If you stick the big bowl there, the little shallow one won't fit along the side. It's very personal.

Our friends KC and Scott are major food people. When they remodeled their kitchen, they went ahead and put in two dishwashers. That never occurs to most people. They were not about to hand-wash the cooking pots, or stack dirty dishes waiting for the first batch to get clean, and that was that. Regular people design their kitchens so that they're standard and ready to sell to someone else. The four of us are not regular people. (Dave's countertop is six inches higher than standard, and we have two refrigerators. One for the beer. If the next people want something different, they'll have to nuke it and start over.)

They should make dishwashers with cut-outs like those old hand-tool pegboards. I am paralyzed by the sight of foreign dishwasher pegs. They look like a shishkebab assembly line. I see the basket for the utensils, but are my friends handle-up or handle-down people? Do they spear the glasses or slip them between the peg rows? What are the rules? 

Once you decide on, say, where a plate goes, you can keep on stacking them in there in parallel. But they might be on the diagonal and you'll end up with unused corner space. If the proprietor of the kitchen happens to come by while you're puzzling, he'll invariably hover and tsk and twist his hands, and finally say "Usually what I do is..."

That's the key right there. It doesn't matter how you put the dishes in. They're just going to get rearranged after you leave.

Sacrament

Dave peered into the beer fridge with concern.

"We have to make a Costco run," he said. He was right. We were down to our last case of beer.

There are lots of people who might not consider 24 beers a panic situation, but we believe in planning and preparing and personal responsibility, and what if a couple bears showed up tonight with a bottle opener? No. It's just too close for comfort.

I did say "beer fridge." Let's call it a legacy item. Forty years ago we got a small refrigerator and drilled a hole in the door and set it up with a keg. We did pretty well with that until we realized we were attracting more friends than we really wanted or liked or, in some cases, recognized. One day we didn't replace the keg and that was that. But the little fridge had been there long enough to be a common-law appliance. We swapped it out for another small fridge and put our beer in there, with some chaperone sodas. We've had two refrigerators all this time. A full beer fridge feels like security. With a full beer fridge, we feel like we are in compliance with earthquake readiness recommendations. We're not, technically, but it feels that way. Disaster? Ha. We laugh at your disaster.

We should probably get a bucket with a toilet seat and dried food and a water filter and a first-aid kit and Handi-Wipes and peanut butter and a lantern and a space blanket and a Saint Bernard, but the lack of a lot of those things can be mitigated with beer. Oh and we're also supposed to have some firearms to protect our stash from our, uh, friends and neighbors and people in need, but we aren't planning to change party affiliation or anything, so no.

Basically, everything I've ever read about a big-ass earthquake leads me to believe the full beer fridge is a solid first step. Followed by the bucket and toilet seat. Stick with the basics and you can avoid the full-on Donner situation.

It's been suggested that being hyper-aware of the number of beers on hand is a bit of a red flag, alcoholism-wise, but who's to draw the line between a nice hobby and a debilitating disease? Also it's not supposed to be a good thing if you obsessively check the beer situation at other people's houses so you can go out for supplies, but what if you're going to be there for hours and they're Hefeweizen people? What then? Some people also think it is some kind of sign if you have to pull over when driving in a dangerous and scary situation to chug a beer before you can keep driving, which I have done twice, and both times were totally justified. Some people think being prepared to take care of your own needs is not a virtue. Suddenly people who think nothing of making sure they have life-saving heart medication on hand are all judgey about other people's needs.

The real reason it's a little nuts to panic when the beer gets low is that we are living spang in the middle of the best beer town in the whole world, and we can get any of thirty or forty different brews inside of a five-minute walk. If we actually ran out of beer, the solution is right around the corner.

But we're prepared. We're self-reliant. We're the Mormons of the beer aisle. That's not a thing, but if it were, that's what we'd be.