House Update.

As you all know, Monika and I are in the process of getting a house, which of course, means that my life has been virtually all-consumed by the transaction. The latest time-waster has been the dishwasher, but first, I should point out that we decided to purchase and install the dishwasher and stove ourselves. The builder would have installed those appliances for us, but the models they planned to install were basic, as in the-bottom-of-the-barrel-basic. Those of you that are aware of Monika's baking prowess know that she deserves a fine convection oven, so that's what we got. We also bought a dishwasher that will actually wash dishes...in theory.

Said dishwasher was delivered on Thursday and yesterday the installer came out to put it in. Of course, he mentions right off the bat that Sears didn't sell us the proper hardware needed to install a dishwasher in a house that's never had one - i.e. the water line. No big deal - I drove with the installer to Lowe's and we got the proper hardware. Back to the house, he hooked up the dishwasher under my casual/careful eye and voila, it just doesn't work. Since we got a fancy-pants dishwasher instead of a turn-the-knob-and-go dishwasher, this means that the LED panel simply goes berserk and pushing any of the buttons is greeted with a "yeah, right." Sometimes a light will turn on next to the button, sometimes a different light will turn on. So I called Sears while the installer was actually still in the house. No big whoop - call a tech and they'll come check it. This morning I waited 4 hours for the tech (at least I got quality reading time) and he came out to verify that yes, the dishwasher doesn't work. There was curiously some drops of water inside the electronics panel, and it doesn't take a BS in electrical engineering to tell me that will seriously screw up the controls. So now someone is going to come out on Tuesday to remove the current dishwasher and install a new one. Hopefully that one will work.

And on a much better note, YAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!! Monika got me a surprise TV for my birthday!! I won't get into the details of how intricate her sneaky web was to make this happen, just know that I was completely shocked. I walked with her into the house yesterday and this bad-boy was sitting in the corner where we are going to put it in the house!!!

It's a 46" Samsung DLP "SLIM" TV. It's only 10" deep although it's rear-projection. The facade nicely matches the aforementioned appliances we got for the house, which will hopefully all be functioning within the next few days. We close on the house Wednesday!