Kitchen Flu

It started with the blocked drain. The water in the sink would not go down but sat there bubbling and burping like a mangrove swamp. I plunged and plunged and the only result was I got drenched with foul smelling sink juice. When it started to smell sharper than cat pee, we called the plumber. 280NIS later it turned out that in mother-in-law-superior's zealous cleaning of the myriad menorahs, post Hanukkah, the drain had become blocked with the high quality wax left by the Chinese candles.

Next the microwave got a virus and just stopped working. Dead, not even the clock's eternal flashing on the wrong time as it has since we got it. Faced with the modern day dilemma of, dare we try fix it or should we just buy new, I insisted on an attempted repair. In my local wondering I pass a nice repair shop on the Raanana Herzliya boarder. I noticed people smiling when leaving and once saw a repair person actually carry a mixer out to an old person's car. Blackwifeo took the micro in, and only two days and 250NIS later it's back heating the food of the masses. I like that. Unbidden they even replaced the light inside, something we have lived without for five years.

But now the dishwasher caught the disease. It was supposed to be a top of the line model. We bought it when we first arrived back in the Holy Land and honestly its a piece of Italian (pronounced Eye-talian) crap. You have to wash the dishes by hand before you put them in the dishwasher or else all that happens is the food gets bonded to the dish. What's the point? But never being bothered by facts, we continue to use it to wash and store hand cleaned dishes. A few days ago it started tripping the mains. This is a pain as each time the house trips the computers need to be restarted (in a specific order) - we must remain online. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that causes a more immediate panic and a slew of extra high priority, meeting interrupting calls to me at work, than handholding the rebooting of blackfamilyo. So the dishwasher will have to be repaired (or replaced), David our appliance dude (he comes all the way from Haifa) will be by Sunday to check it out. In the mean time I'm on extra kitchen duty.

I've noticed that appliances disease seems to spread from one machine to the next. I wonder what will be next. I just hope it's not Jonathan the washing machine.