My Busy Week

Not just this week, but last week, too.

I guess I didn't post about last week's washer breakdown. Yes, the same Kenmore front-loading washing machine that I replaced the speed control board and timer on last August.

Last Tuesday I opened the door after a white load to find that the bearings had finally given out on this washer. Which meant my formerly-white laundry got covered with tiny speckles and great big smears of blackish-brown bearing grease.

I knew the bearings were going, and last year when I was searching for parts and information to fix the washer, I read a lot about how bearing failure was a known problem in my particular washer. Now I guess I am going to learn more than I really wanted to know. If I can still find a replacement rear tub/bearing shell.

The repairs I did last year were relatively easy. They involved stuff like unscrewing screws and unplugging the connectors from the bad part, then plugging in the new good part.

This repair involves removing heavy parts not designed with female upper body strength in mind. For example, the concrete counterweights on the drum. Or the tub shell bolts that were tightened by gorillas with pneumatic tools. [glower]

Another thing that was going on last week, besides getting ready for the demo and calling the washer bad names was that my husband was away at one of the various National Guard things he has to go to. Drill weekends, annual training, schools, and other miscellaneous training things. Single-parent duty is not my favorite thing, and people whose spouses are deployed have my utmost respect.

Yet another thing we did last week, to redeem the day after the washer went spoing, was to make cakewaffles!

I read about these on Ravelry, but this was the first time I ever tried them. You take a cake mix (yes, you can make a scratch cake, go ahead!), mix it up, heat up and grease your waffle iron well, then you use the cake batter to make waffles!

So far we've tried a yellow cake mix and a devil's-food one. Our son was absolutely charmed with them, and they really did help make a breaking-things day better. (Hey, you could make a chocolate cakewaffle, top it with whipped cream and cherry pie filling, and call it a Black Forest cakewaffle.)

Yesterday I spent most of the day at the Trash Dash, where local schools race cars made out of trash: plastic bottles, bottle caps, foam trays.

Most of the schools send middle-school age kids, but our little school is so small that they let the 3rd through 6th graders compete. We heard, "What grade are you in?" more than once. But the kids did okay, and one of their made-on-the-spot cars came in second in the Engineering Design Challenge.

After driving three under-10-year-old boys there and back again and spending nearly an hour and a half total in the car, I was very ready for some all by myself time.