Hauling Birthdays, Part I

My wife Ashley is about to celebrate a birthday on Saturday. I won't say how old she is, cause she'd hit me, but she's two years older than I am and it's pretty easy to figure out how old I am. (She was gonna hit me anyway.)

Ever since we left higher paying gigs in the big city to move to WV three years back, for med-school and library servitude respectively, we've not done any major huge presents for one another. This year, I wouldn't let her get me a present at all for my birthday as I was already going to be spending some money for Dragon Con the following weekend which I thought was a fine birthday present in and of itself.

With her birthday impending, I spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with what I was going to do for her. She's a fairly simple gal, who cares not for diamonds, pearls or expensive fru fru. She doesn't wear a lot of jewelry, usually just her wedding set and a pair of earrings or maybe her favorite necklace, featuring a small gold nugget that was one of the only products of her father's former Alaskan gold mine. She does like shoes quite a bit, but not excessively so. What to get her? What to get her?

Then I thought of it...

One of our last major purchases, outside of car repair, was a brand new clothes washer, a Big ol' Kenmore with the porcelain on steel top. We got it shortly after moving into the house we now rent, in April of 2003, and we love it as much as two people can love a major appliance. It's nice and roomy and is so much more efficient at washing our clothes than the tiny apartment-style washer we’d been using since we got married. (In fact, that and the tale of how we came to own our dryer, and the resulting chaos that followed, are great stories that I shall have to tell here another day.)

With the new Mo’ Better washer firmly installed, we had the question of what to do with our old apartment-style washer. Neither of us own a truck, so we couldn’t just haul it off ourselves. Having dropped a lot of cash in the moving process itself, we also didn’t want to spend any more money in order to get rid of it, so renting a truck seemed out of the question. We called around to the local shelters and charity organizations, but while most of them would have gladly accepted it none of them had the capability to come and remove it from our home. So as a temporary measure, we rolled it into the kitchen and used it as an island for a while until we could come up with some ingenious way to get rid of it.

Months passed. Eventually, Ashley got it in her head that she wanted to build a butcher-block island to replace the defunct washer. She marched right down to the hardware store, told them what she wanted to do and spent an hour or so with the very helpful gentleman there drawing up plans and ordering the butcher-block itself. (The hardware man said, “I take it you’re the handyman in your house?” to which she responded, “Oh, yeah.”) She bought most of the other materials she would need from them, got me to drive her to the nearest city with a Lowes for what the local store didn’t have and then spent all her spare time for a month sawing, sanding and constructing it. When she was finished, she had a beautiful and sturdy butcher-block island to call her very own.

With the new Mo’ Better island firmly installed, we again had the question of what to do with our old apartment-style washer. We still didn’t own a truck, still couldn’t find any charitable organizations who did either and were still too cheap to call U-Haul. Ash was all for putting a sign out by the road or an ad in the classifieds to sell it. Trouble was, while the washer does work it doesn’t work so good as you would hope a washer you paid good money for might. It would do in a pinch, if you didn't have one at all, but you’d probably have to do the spin cycle a couple of times to get all the soap and water out of your clothes. So we just rolled it over into a corner of the kitchen, in front of our cookbook shelf, and began piling junk mail on top of it.

Months passed. In fact, a year passed and suddenly it was early this month and I’d started wondering what to do for her birthday. That’s when I hit upon the fine idea of getting rid of the washer once and for all.

"How would you do it?" you might ask. Ahhh, I would rent a truck.

"Hey, but I thought you were a cheap bastard, and stuff," you might also say. Sure am. However, I was going to spend $20 at the bare minimum for a birthday present for my wife anyway, so why not funnel that Yuppie $5 into renting a truck, getting rid of the devil washer and securing myself a warm place in my wife’s affections for the effort? (Nothing turns her on more than me doing physical labor and/or cleaning. Well, Adrian Paul, maybe.) I could just picture her coming home, walking in the door and spying the 3'x2'x2' patch of empty space where the washer once sat. And on the floor, in the middle of the patch, would be the beautiful birthday card I bought her at a local downtown gallery. Sounded like a plan.

Trouble is, my surprises like this NEVER work out and I have a long and storied history of them not working out.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)