These are the themes of our lives

Lately we’ve been having theme weekends. Not the fun kind of themes you might find on a cruise or at a party, but themes nonetheless. Last weekend the theme was ‘laundry’, and while I’m sure we could have filled it with piles of stuff to be folded, instead we took apart the washer and dryer. The washer hoses were clogged with gross slime, so we washed them out and emptied the filter. This is the first time we’ve emptied the filter (since until last weekend, we didn’t know it existed) and it was full of gross detritus, Polly Pocket shoes, an old sock and more hair than Ben has on his entire head. Now that we’ve done all that the washer runs quite nicely and no longer makes a weird gurgling noise when it drains. It’s amazing what improves when you maintain stuff! The dryer was full of lint in every crevice, so we vacuumed out all the excess junk and now it only takes one cycle to dry a load of laundry.

That makes the theme of this weekend ‘garage’. And despite the great need to clean out all the junk in there, we (if by ‘we’ I mean ‘Ben’) instead fixed the garage door opener. It quit working this week, so I waited for Ben to return from Texas to fix it. He diagnosed the problem quite quickly, but our dilemma was whether to fix the current known problem (and possibly find out there are unknown problems) or replace the whole thing. We usually lean towards replacing the whole thing, but knowing that we’re moving soon and will probably need every spare penny to fix up this place had us going for the cheaper option.

While these themes are less fun than ‘Surf’s up!’ or other such party themes, I’m glad that we have the blessing of being able to take care of our problems without too much drama. Even the virus our computers caught last weekend was taken care of in a few hours, and it made me very thankful that we have a mac, which was used to look up solutions to fix the other two. I think this means that we are officially in the ‘fixit’ season of our life. Thanks goodness for a shed full of tools to do it with!