This morning's small tragedy:

Notice the sad little lump of purple in the bottom left hand corner. I would say this is more than a small tragedy, but I have to be realistic. Its just a single blossom from my orchid, its not a pet or even the whole plant. But you have to understand how I've been nurturing this poor thing since it began to sprout a new spike back in December. Since I had never gotten an orchid to bloom again, I was pretty excited.

Those two blossoms looked so promising and they were so close to opening up. Out of nowhere this morning one of them drops off. I don't know if I just bumped it or something is wrong. It makes me pretty nervous about the one left too. If anybody has any idea why that would happen let me know.

For now, I think I just need a little time to mourn.

Happiness =

Empty laundry baskets and clean socks, all without leaving home!

And yes, it had been a while since I washed a load of whites, we don't usually go through that many socks in one week.

The important part is that our washer and dryer are working just fine and I don't have to save up my quarters anymore! (They didn't even have to cut a whole in our wall, so the fix ended up being pretty quick and easy).

Also, while I'm posting pictures...

I know this is a little late, but this was my Valentines Day present to Ryan: (he loved it)

Isn't that romantic? Who wouldn't want a heart-shaped potato for Valentines Day?

Why don't things ever turn out as simple as you expect?

For example, this weekend I finally convinced a certain someone to take the plunge and buy a washer and dryer for me. It was supposed to go like this:

a) call the seller

b) go look at the washer and dryer

c) make use of the free local delivery from the ad

d) hook them up in our laundry room

e) do about 8 loads of laundry

f) enjoy the rest of our Saturday

As you can guess, that's not what happened.

The first three steps went pretty well, the machines looked great and all we would need was to go pick up a the little vent thing for the dryer. It was step d where we had some issues.

First of all, the cord on the dryer did not match up with the one on the wall. Apparently those who are appliance savvy would have known that there were different types of plug-ins, but I thought that only happened when you went to Europe.

Once we figured out what we would have to do for that, we decided to go ahead and at least hook up the washer. Now this part should have been easy. We had a set of hoses that were already hooked up to the faucets in the wall as well as a set that came with the machines. We went ahead and hooked up the ones from the wall, but as soon as we turned them on, they leaked all over the place. They must have been on there quite a while because not only were the seals broken but they were also rusted on.

Ryan pulled out some shiny things from his toolbox to get that rusted thing off the wall with no luck. He even went to visit our plumber neighbor for some bigger shiny things but they didn't work either. The last thing we wanted was for the whole thing to pop off and have our own waterworks show in our laundry room. That only left the option of filling out a request for the maintenance people to come and try. If they broke anything they would have to fix it themselves, right?

So no clean laundry for me today.

However, a very nice plumber has come to visit this morning. So far he has only turned off all our water and made several different trips back to "the shop" for new tools and things. Its not as easy as he thought either.

It never is.