Lesson Learned the Hard Way #894

Noodles: they expand when wet.

And when you put them in your garbage disposal and grind them up, they get angry and expand all up in your plumbing, causing pipes to overflow into your laundry room and belch out bloated noodle chunks into your yard, and just over the property line into your neighbor's yard for good measure.

Consider that a free lesson, folks. Write it down and refer to it often.

Another lesson that I learned this week: I have become oblivious to the many quirks and eccentricities of my house, but the minute a repairman walks in the front door, they become glaring eyesores.

My house was built in the early seventies. My husband and I fell in love with it at first sight; we loved the floor plan, the spacious bedrooms, the newly refurbished bathrooms, the back yard, the beautiful trees shading the entire lot.

Being that it was built in the seventies, well, it does have its quirks. (But as its owners, we were also built in the seventies and have quirks of our own, so we are very understanding.)

It has a seventies-style mirrored wet bar in the living room. Just in case walking the extra ten feet into the kitchen is too far to go for a lukewarm drink. It has electrical wiring in certain rooms that sometimes works, sometimes not. It has a ceiling fan that comes on at random in the winter, but refuses to work in the heat of summer. It has doors that don't always close just right, and if you get cold in one room of the house, you can invariably find another room that is five or six degrees warmer. It has outdoor lighting with such oddly-sized bulbs that we finally just quit trying to replace them. Every one of the toilets in my house runs funny. The handles have to be jiggled just right, or held down an extra moment or two while flushing. The faucet in my kitchen leaks. The shower button in my bathroom is permanently fused in the 'shower' position. I could go on and on.

All of these things I have learned to live with, and in fact, I have become so accustomed to them that I hardly even notice them any more.

Of course, they were pointed out to me this week by a very helpful and moderately-priced plumber who knew a cash cow when he saw it. (The house, I mean, not me. I hope.) He also gave me a terrific lecture about how I should not be putting any food down my garbage disposal. At all. Basically I guess the only reason I should use the garbage disposal is for chopping up liquids. So helpful.

If you were hoping I was going to wrap this up with a witty life lesson or at least a decent joke about plumber's crack, well, you would be wrong. (He is coming back next week to fix a few bathroom issues, so I'll try to come up with something by then.)

I am curious to know, is your house this way, too? Or do you immediately repair anything that goes awry?