not so surprised

so this is how things go.

yesterday morning the door people called. the installer fellow was allegedly sick and could we please reschedule for next week? my disappointment was great but there was nothing to be done. the new door now is supposed to arrive and be installed next thursday, a week from tomorrow, the 18th. that does seem like a long time from now, with our current swollen and sticking door.

in the afternoon a plumber paid a visit regarding installing the garbage disposal. i was only after an estimate. but the plumber was rather a jerk. he spent quite a bit of time discussing the women in his life. i don't know why he felt the need to share. he said he'd been married for 18 years and then found his wife in bed with his best friend. tragic, sure, but trite. so he got drunk for several months and then got sober and joined an internet dating service. he screened a few women and started dating one of them. she had a lot of issues and he told me he has a weakness for women with issues - he wants to save them. so they dated for a few months and then that woman's mother made a pass at him. or something. he wasn't interested in the mother. while he was in my house he accepted a call on his cell from a woman - i'm not sure if it's the same woman or a new one - and he told her he was on a job and would be busy for two or three hours, obviously a lie. then when he got off the phone with her he told me he was going to buy a huge expensive car and screen women severely before getting involved again.

then he started talking about our kitchen sink. what a disaster. he couldn't stop laughing. the washing machine isn't hooked up correctly. we don't have an air gap at all. the garbage disposal i bought is enormous. he could install it, sure, but the waste from the disposal would flow directly into the washing machine, the way things are set up now. that would be gross. the valves under the sink are the worst kind of valves possible to have. plus, the cabinet under the sink is small and the disposal would block access to the pipes behind it, so if ever work needed to be done on those pipes, the disposal would have to be taken off and then put back on, and he mentioned a dollar amount. he talked a lot about money. how much money he made last week, how much money he'd made so far today, how he would take my money but would feel bad about it. i told him i wasn't going to give him any money.

isn't it not really polite to talk to strangers about how much money you make? sure, i'm making more money now, doing transcription, than i ever have before doing anything else, and i'm happy about that. this plumber makes quite a bit more than i do, and that's of course fine, in and of itself, but he was actually a bit of an asshole about it.

anyway. the estimate he gave me for the installation was in the range of $1200, though he said that it wouldn't work the way i'd want it to. he recommended i return the garbage disposal to sears. on that point, after his lengthy diatribes, i was in agreement with him. he recommended doing some remodeling before even thinking about a disposal. (he personally is against garbage disposals. they're not good for the lines, he said. he recommended i get a pig. i think we'd rather have a goat.) he recommended getting a double sink to replace our small single sink. he said, if this were his house, that he would move the sink to where the counter is now, by the window, away from the dishwasher, next to the stove. make some room that way. then we could think about installing a garbage disposal, if we still want one. the ideas didn't sound like bad ones, and we might do what he suggests, but not immediately.

so kara's not getting the disposal for her birthday. i'm a bit sad after all that. i told her the whole plumber story when she got home from work. i think i was more disappointed than she was. the disposal is going back to sears on friday. she says she's glad i tried to get her a garbage disposal for her birthday. but it's not going to work out.

there are other projects that will take precedence over the kitchen work. she wants windows and french doors put in upstairs, because one day (after max is gone) we'll use the huge upstairs room as our bedroom. now there's just random stuff up there. we still miss all the built-in cabinets and stuff in our old house.

it snowed last night. there's an inch or two on the ground. that's kind of a surprise.