Summer, A Broken Bowl, and No Dishwasher

First off, have you entered the giveaway for a free custom photo shoot from Marcie Jessee Photography?  If not, go enter!

Secondly, I apologize for my neglect over the past couple of days.  About Headband Week and just in general.  I still have a few more headband ideas, some of which I might save for another time, and one more that I for sure want to do to finish off Headband Week.  I had big plans to make one and write the tutorial for it yesterday, but... well, we had a relaxing, lazy Saturday instead.  The weather has been beautiful--sunny and just the right temperature of warm--and outside has just been calling my name.  Here where I live in Utah there are primarily two long seasons (a cold, snowy winter and a hot, dry summer) separated by a brief couple of weeks of spring and fall in between.  And after living here for six years now I've finally learned to drop everything and enjoy the nice weather when it comes.  So that's what we've been doing the past few days instead of making headbands.  Sorry! 

In other not very exciting news, I cut my hand.  Or, more accurately, a bowl cut my hand.  When I was washing dishes a couple of days ago (Did I tell you we got rid of our dishwasher?  Long story.  Perhaps I'll tell you in a minute.) I was washing a handmade ceramic bowl that I got at a fundraiser a year or so ago.  As I was rinsing it off the bowl slipped out of my hands, fell into our porcelain sink, and broke clean in two.  It made me sad.  I liked that little bowl a lot.  Bryan had a similar one that he got at the same fundraiser that I accidentally broke quite a few months ago.  Sadly, his broke into quite a few pieces.  He's been asking me for a while to glue it back together, but I knew it wasn't any use, so I haven't.  Perhaps now I'll make a mosaic out of them or something.  Although I would have rather had them as bowls.  We use to eat our ice cream out of them.  Sigh.  Anyway, right after the bowl fell in the sink and broke the phone rang, so I only had a moment of remorse before I had to hurry and dry my hands so I could answer the phone.  It was my mom on the other end, calling to chat with me about some things for a giveaway she wanted to do on The Skinny to encourage our readers to donate money so other people around the world could have clean water.  Since she didn't need me on the computer to help her, I went back to washing dishes.  That was when I saw my hand.  "Mom, can you call me back in ten minutes?  My hand is bleeding."  It wasn't cut that badly.  I didn't cry.  I just washed it out with soap and water and went to put a bandage on it.  And then I stopped doing the dishes.  I quit trying to keep a band-aid on it a couple hours later.  It's split open a couple of times, but part of me likes that.  It's the part of me that loves to be outside in the warm weather.  There's something about raggedy bracelets and sun-tanned skin and shorts and scratches that speaks of a summer time spent outdoors.  And I know my scratch was obtained inside washing the dishes (not outside, climbing a tree or something), but it makes me feel the same way when I'm out romping around in my shorts to go on walks or to sit outside with my daughter.  Summer is coming.  And I'm wearing a raggedy bracelet.  And I have a cut to prove it.

So the dishwasher story will be a let down compared to my poetic attempt to explain how I feel about summer, but I'll tell it now anyway.  Or else I never might.  And then it will just be one of those holes that I always mean to fill in, but never bother getting around to. 

A couple year ago when Bryan and I were engaged and we knew we were moving in to the same apartment complex as my sister (and in the same stairwell) she called us one day to ask if we wanted to buy her friend's dishwasher.  The apartments don't come with built-in dishwashers, but her friend that lived upstairs from her was moving out into a house and was selling the portable dishwasher that they owned.  We went ahead and bought it, so--up until a couple of weeks ago--we had had the luxury of having a dishwasher our entire married lives.  We had skipped that phase of picturesque newly weddedness of having to wash all of our dishes by hand.  And that was okay by me.  Then, a couple of weeks ago we got a notice on our clipboard.  We get notices from the complex all the time, so I didn't even pay attention to it.  Except I saw that the title said something about appliances and I was hoping that meant they were going to be giving us new ovens or something.  (Our current ovens are basically the equivalent of slightly-bigger-than-usual Easy Bake ovens.)  But that wasn't what the notice said.  When Bryan came home he actually read it ...and it was not what I had hoped for.  Apparently somebody in the complex had a portable dishwasher and somehow it leaked and flooded the entire apartment (Or that apartment and the ones below it?  I don't remember now.)  and had resulted in a very expensive repair job.  So the complex was kindly reminding everyone that portable dishwashers and external freezers (like, the big ones you put a whole elk in or something) weren't allowed.  Apparently this had always been a rule, but Bryan and I genuinely never knew it.  We considered keeping our dishwasher.  We're only going to be here for about another year and then we'll be moving somewhere else for Bryan to go to optometry school and probably we'd never get caught with it between now and then.  But then there was always the chance that something would happen and then we'd be in really big trouble.  Or it was possible--unlikely, I suppose, but possible--that they would crack down and actually enforce the rule and then everybody in our very large complex would be trying to sell their dishwashers at the exact same time.  We decided we didn't want to try our luck at either of those situations and we decided to obey the rules and get rid of it.  Which was such a good decision.  Not only were we able to sell the dishwasher right away (because there were hardly any portable dishwashers listed on Craigslist), but we got a fair amount for it.  And, our apartment is so much nicer now.  Really.  I never would have imagined how much of a difference having our dishwasher gone would make.  For the past two years our kitchen table has been scooched over into the living room because there wasn't room for it in the kitchen, because the dishwasher was in in the kitchen.  Which meant that our living room always felt crowded.  And our furniture had to be arranged in kind of a funky way.  Things are so much nicer now.  The table is in the kitchen.  Our armchairs are finally out in our living room.  It's homey and cozy.  And we did so much rearranging of furniture that even the big O's room feels a lot more open and welcoming and cozy now.  The whole apartment feels nicer.  So, while it would be nice to have a dishwasher, I have absolutely no regrets about selling ours when we did.  Cutting my hand a couple days ago has really been the only downside.  Oh, and, well, you know, having to actually wash the dishes.