So far, so good

After much debate, we gave in and had Home Service Plus over to fix the dryer. The boys tried hard to fix it... ever heard of a baffle? We hadn't either. In case you need to know, it's the little fin inside your drier that you never noticed until it fell off.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. It seems like the "least handy people in the world," is a narrative that is no longer helpful during these uncertain times requiring much skill. As we often joke, if it was up to us to run the machines, build the computers and the cars, and put together Ikea furniture, everyone would be fucked. Why does everything—everything!—have to be about learning something? Why is there always—always!—a takeaway? A growth opportunity? Why does all the yogi talk keep coming back to taunt me?

So, the boys did fix the baffle. Woohooo! Score! Miracle! But that was after they took the wrong side of the dryer apart and accidentally dropped part of the door hinge into the black hole between the dryer door and the inside of the dryer, lost in space. While they were accomplishing that, somehow the hose got disconnected from the wall. Hmmm. Maybe we should quit while we're not too far behind?

Well. You can imagine the dilemma there. Call HSP and risk death or hang stuff on the line for a while? First of all, what line? Anyway, we called. We're not stupid. What kind of life is it, after all, to have to hang all your laundry every day?

So we got to work. We sanitized. They came. We sanitized. We sanitized some more. Dryer works. Took less than an hour. And here we left them a long note and what was broken, micromanaging from upstairs, the same way my grandma used to micromanage the cleaning lady, following her around the house with a microfiber cloth whenever she came over to clean their apartment in Palm Springs. 

Anyway, it's done. Maybe we'll brave the laundry room today or tomorrow. I figure we can stop worrying in a few days.

It amazes me how much this virus adds story to the most mundane of details. I finally fully understand what my playwriting teacher meant when she told me to "write every single scene "as though as bomb is about to go off under the table." Raise those stakes! Who knew those stakes would be a virus, but I suppose it's as likely a plot conflict as any. Antagonist=virus=tension=conflict=good story. And here I thought that was the easy way out. After all, it had been done so many times before.