The Salvateenies: 22 Weeks (and Blog Post 100)

It's a four-day weekend, and Friday was set up full of home improvement appointments. First the plumber was coming to insert our garbage disposal (the contractor keeps saying "disposer", but that just sounds so wrong...on the other hand, "Insinkerator" is an incredibly amazing brand name). Then the window-measurer came from Lowe's so that we would know exactly what blinds to get. Of course, he got exactly the same measurements I had gotten last week, so I guess that just proves I'm no slouch when it comes to reading a tape measure. It also means we still have to go to Lowe's and order the blinds, or shades, or whatever they are. He told us that because our window surrounds are shallow, we will probably be limited to getting cellular shades if we want to mount them inside the windows and not drill into the pretty wood frames on the outside. Which is disappointing, since cellular shades are pretty ugly. But maybe we'll discover something amazing that makes them just right. One can only hope.

The rest of the day was to be occupied by all things dishwasher. It was supposed to arrive between 2:30 and 4:30 and be installed between 4:30 and 8:30. We purchased the dishwasher from Sears over a month ago (at the same time we made our ill-fated refrigerator purchase) and at that time were told that it was on back-order and the earliest we could get it was today, February 18th. All week we've gotten automated phone calls from Sears telling us it would arrive on Friday. So imagine my surprise when I awoke at 7:30 to a phone call from some branch of Sears corporate, bringing me the news that my dishwasher was still backlogged and would not be available, it seemed, until April first at the earliest. And just to rub salt in the wound, the lovely woman calling me from a cubicle somewhere in Texas pointed out that the delay was because we'd ordered the refrigerator in bisque. If we wanted it in white (the color, it turns out, of the rest of our appliances), we could have had it way back in January when we went into the store to buy it. Gee, thanks for telling us that at the time, useless excuse for an appliance salesman!

At ten o'clock, I used the code Miss Texas had given me to bypass the call center at Sears and get connected to the appliance manager at the San Bruno store. Only he doesn't come in until one, so I talked to Neil the Electronics Manager instead. When I told him the part about April 1st, he sighed, "Oh, Jesus Christ." and asked for the purchase information and my phone number. He called back about thirty minutes later telling me that the order had been changed to a white dishwasher, which would arrive at the store by Monday and could be installed, probably, Tuesday or Wednesday. He also noticed that the wonder-salesman from January had sold me the extended warranty for the fridge that wouldn't fit through our door on the dishwasher sales transaction, so when the fridge was returned, they failed to remove the charge for its warranty. He fixed that for me too. He told me he would talk to the appliance guy when he came in to see what more they could do to make up for all the problems there had been with my order, but I didn't hear back from him again. I think I'll bring that up when I call Monday to check on the status of the delivery.

The sad part is how much I'd been looking forward to spending all night tonight loading up all our dishes that have been poorly hand-washed by me for the past decade and getting them all pretty and sparkly to put back in the cabinets.

So to combat that sadness, I will now post the pictures of the babies taken Wednesday to mark their 22-week birthday.