#3 - The Lint Trap

Most of the time, I feel pretty accomplished for my age. Several years back, when I was just 24, I was already living on my own, working a great full time job, supporting myself completely. I rented a nice little house, I had a dog, I managed to keep myself fed, and I could do my own laundry. I was set. Something to be proud of! 

Actually I’ve always found the jokes about boys finally learning how to do their own laundry pretty funny – I grew up doing laundry as a kid, so I can’t imagine never knowing how to do it yourself. However, it’s rather amazing how possible it is to forget certain details about tasks you’ve been doing your whole life. I learned that the year my dryer stopped working. Well, it ran – but it didn’t dry my clothes. And I may have fit enough criteria to be considered a mature adult contributing to society, but I am not a mechanic by any means and have no idea how to trouble-shoot fixing an appliance. So I just went without it for a while. 

This wasn’t a huge problem for me, because I don’t do laundry that often. The reason for that is my borderline obsessive addiction to clothes shopping, which would require a whole other post to delve into. The point is, I had so much clothing (including underwear!) I could go for quite a while without having to do laundry. But eventually the not being able to dry my clothes became enough of a nuisance to me that I wanted to do something about it. 

I had several of my guy friends come check it out. No one could find anything out of order. One friend even climbed my roof while I was running the dryer, to see if he could feel the air blowing through the duct up there. When no one found a solution, I turned to good ol’ Dad. What are dads for, if not helping their single daughter with their domestic household problems? Still no answers. Finally, I brought my dryer woes to my Tuesday night Bible Study group. As I was relaying the story to our leader, George (he does seem to catch me at some of my worst moments, doesn’t he?) he started peppering me with questions:

George: “did you check the air duct for clogs?”

Me: “yes.”

George: “what about the heating device?”

Me: “yep.”

George: “and the motor still runs?”

Me: “yes.”

George: “have you checked the lint trap?”

Me: “………………………….lint trap?”

George: *facepalm*

And that was how we discovered that even though I had been doing laundry my whole life at my parents house, for some reason I had forgotten that I needed to empty the lint trap on my own dryer. So I never had. Since I had bought the dryer. Ever. 

The best moment was when I had to remind George how long I had been living there and using the dryer. When I told him it was a little over 2 years, he nearly flipped his lid. I had to hear several lectures about how I could have burned the house down (please…like I haven’t had to deal with THAT fear before). 

When I got home to finally address the issue, I have to admit I was a little frightened at what would happen when I opened the lint trap. Was it so full it would all come exploding out at high rates of speed? Would I just find a burned up charcoaled wad of lint? Well, it wasn’t either of those. Actually it wasn’t even that bad. But it did take a couple tools to scrape out the ridiculous amount of lint that was packed in there. 

Come to think of it, I should have saved it, it would have made a lovely sweater. If only I knew how to knit...

#2 Blonde Moment

#1 Blonde Moment

#2 - The Gas Tank

I have an unfortunate habit of making a fool of myself whenever I’m trying to make a good first impression on someone. Especially if that someone is of the male persuasion. 

Several years ago, there was a handsome fellow from work that I had taken an interest in (let’s call him “Ralph” although names have been changed to protect the innocent :)), and by some turn of good fortune, we had quickly gotten to know each other better over a weekend of hanging out with mutual friends. At some point during our acquaintance, we had discovered we were both taking a trip down to the LA area the following weekend, and had casually discussed car-pooling together. When fate intervened and Ralph’s car conveniently broke down the next morning, our casual idea turned into concrete plans. 

Now that I was fully nervous about car-pooling down to LA with a boy for the weekend, I had some thinking to do. My car at the time had proven to be rather unreliable, so my best friend, being the amazing person she is, offered to let me borrow her Toyota Avalon for the weekend. I was all over this idea, since her car was far more slick than my own. All leather black interior? Don’t mind if I do. I set off for my weekend adventure with Ralph in confidence.

Without going on too many tangents, let me just suffice it to say, the weekend turned out to be a comedy of errors. Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, we were to meet up with Ralph’s friend for lunch, and since I was driving my friend’s car, I was taking extra care with it. I was having trouble parking at our lunch destination – if you’ve ever driven in West Hollywood, you’ll understand my plight. After 20 minutes of both boys standing outside the car trying to guide me into the spot, I gave up and let Ralph do it, which he managed to somehow accomplish in less than one move, or something ridiculous like that. 

Then it turned out the event I was down there for was actually on Sunday, not Saturday, so now I had clearly proven I was a  scatterbrained girl who can’t keep her calendar straight AND can’t drive. 

The coup-de-gras was the day we left. After a weekend of feeling completely self-defeated by my own folly, I was just looking forward to getting out of there. It was clear any chance I had of giving this guy the impression I was a completely put-together, mature, capable young woman, had flown out the window. We just had one last stop before we could hit the highway – the gas station. 

Ralph offered to get us some snacks while I filled up. I immediately noticed something was wrong because the nozzle didn’t seem to fit in the tank opening. Now some of you may already know exactly where this story is headed, but I promise you, I was still completely oblivious at this point. I thought maybe the tank in her car was different, or perhaps the nozzles at this station were different (yes, I ACTUALLY thought that). So I held the nozzle up against the opening to the tank and filled ‘er up. 

Just as I was finishing, Ralph came out and offered to drive home, so he slid behind the wheel. We got about 5 feet from the gas station driveway before the car died. Now panic was filling my chest because I didn’t want anything to happen to my friend’s car. Ralph was running through the usual checklist of what might be wrong, and he finally looked at me, with what might have been pity in his eyes, and asked “Steph…you didn’t….you didn’t fill the tank with diesel fuel…did you?!” I kid you not, my exact words, full of indignation, were “I’m not that stupid!” Ralph clearly had already learned better at this point, and asked to see my receipt. I pulled it out and together we leaned it to get the verdict. There it was, in bold print – the word practically jumping off the page, laughing in my face – “Diesel”. *sigh* there was nothing I could say to come back from this one. 

Ralph was mercifully kind about the whole thing. We had to call a tow truck to haul the car to a local dealership, and find a rental car to get us home. One more weekend and 700$ later, my friend’s tank was cleaned and we had to drive back down to Hollywood to pick it up. That was one expensive lesson. 

In my defense, it was one of the most confusing gas stations I have ever visited. After this incident, I obviously did some research to prevent further accidents, and learned that most diesel nozzles have green handles and are located on the far side of the pump, away from the regular three. Neither scenario was true for this particular station. That’s what I remind myself of, anyway, to make myself feel better. 

Oh, and this may surprise you, but things between Ralph and I…well, they never worked out. I heard he’s married now. That could have been me. And it’s all the gas station’s fault…..perhaps it’s a conspiracy, to keep me single forever. Another theory to add to my list…

#3 Blonde Moment
#1 Blonde Moment

I'm not really a natural blonde, I swear!

My last few posts have all been a little serious…so I decided I needed to lighten the mood in here. If you know me well, you’ve probably heard me reference my “top list of blonde moments” a few times. I feel one of the best ways to avoid personal humiliation via public mockery is to expose your most embarrassing moments yourself. So here they are, over the next 3 days – the top 3 Stephanie Blonde Moments:

#1 – The Pumpkin

I’m really not good at moving. I blame being in a military family. It wasn’t until our last move, after my Army dad retired, that I realized normal people actually have to wrap and box up all of their own belongings themselves. So, as a result, when I had to move out of my first rental home and asked for my friends help, I was not fully prepared the morning of moving day. If you ask my friends, they’ll say that’s the understatement of the century – almost nothing was in boxes and there were still items in every room. Needless to say, they were a bit disgruntled with me when they showed up and saw the work still needing to be done. However, being the awesome friends they are, we all got to work packing things up. 

As I worked on cleaning out my refrigerator, I heard some rather disturbed screeching coming from my laundry room. Amongst the garbled words, I heard the phrase “what IS that??” Knowing my past history with hoarding (that's a story for another time), the yelling set off an alarm in my head and struck fear in my heart. What had they found exactly? I started flipping through the catalogue of my brain to try and quickly assess what item I had shoved up there and forgotten about – and that’s when I heard someone yell “wait a minute….is that….IT’S STILL IN HERE?!” – and that’s when it hit me. With those words, I knew exactly what they had discovered. 

I hurried to the laundry room, where George – my older, wiser, much respected Bible Study leader and youth pastor at our church – was clearing out the cabinets above the washer and dryer. That truly is such an inconvenient space for short people – so hard to reach. It’s where you store uncommon items that you don’t need constant access to – things like old dingy beach towels or potpourri baskets you received in a white elephant gift exchange. They might also hold random holiday decorations. For example, the LIVING pumpkin I had bought at the grocery store the previous year for Halloween. 

Let me interject here to provide some small explanation in my own defense – when I bought the pumpkin, I intended to use it for decoration purposes, but for some reason, in my own mind, I thought that if you didn’t cut it open, it wouldn’t rot. So, naturally, it would be perfectly acceptable to store it up in the cabinet for use in future Halloween festivities. Ok, feel free to let the utter ridiculousness of that thought marinate, and then revel in my utter stupidity for a moment. Now let’s move on. 

As I walked into the laundry room, I looked up into the offending cabinet, and there it was – a large, white, fuzzy mound in the corner. It was covered with so much mold, you couldn’t quite tell what the original shape of the object was. Now, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part of the story yet. The worst part of all of this is, I already knew what to expect when I walked into that laundry room, because this wasn’t the first time I had discovered the moldy gourd. 

Several months prior to moving day, I had stumbled upon it myself during my regular cleaning process. That time, it took me quite a while to figure out what it was, since I was too afraid to even get close to it for a better look. Once I remembered what it was, I understood with great horror, what a terrible mistake I had made. Too disgusted to even deal with it at the time, I chose to pretend I had seen nothing and simply closed the cabinet and quickly walked away. On a side note, I learned that’s a great way to handle your problems – just pretend they don’t exist. That really helps solve them. 

A couple weeks went by, and AGAIN by accident I discovered the moldy art form growing in the cabinet. It shocked me just as much the second time. Yet again, I chose not to confront the situation and ignored it completely. At the following Tuesday bible study, I decided to poke fun at myself and regale the story of finding the hideous pumpkin with the other members of my small group. As usual, they were fully entertained by the tales of my madcap shenanigans, and we all laughed marvelously at how silly I am. Unfortunately, in that moment on moving day, standing in front of that same cabinet, George was no longer laughing. Our conversation went something like this:

George: “is this the pumpkin you were telling us about months ago?!”

Me: “ummm…..yes?”

George: “you mean after you found it the first time, you didn’t clean it up?!”

Me: “well…..no. obviously.” 

George: “WHY NOT?!”

Me: “ew, are you kidding?! It’s disgusting! I wasn’t about to touch that.”

George: *facepalm*

At that point, the rubber gloves and roll of paper towels was handed to me, and everyone cleared out of the room so fast you would have thought a countdown for total annihilation of the building had just commenced. Now it was time to pay seriously for my poorly chosen act of procrastination. The longer the pumpkin had sat in the cabinet, the more time it had to…deteriorate. The moment I tried to lift it onto the pile of newspaper I laid down (that poor Bakersfield Californian never knew what hit it), it fell to pieces in my hands. 

I won’t torture you with further details of the cleanup. Needless to say, I had to face further inquiry afterwards as to why on earth I had decided to leave the mess after finding it the first time, and have been teased mercilessly about it ever since. Still to this day, the topic of pumpkins in general cannot be brought up without some form of taunting directed my way. I only have myself to blame.

#2 Blonde Moment
#3 Blonde Moment