Dishwasher is broken

Tons of family crammed into our small space for Thanksgiving

After nearly 5 years of blissful marital living in the small condo we bought when we moved out to Salt Lake City, and 1.5 years of cramped family living in the same small condo, my husband and I finally moved to a larger space. We ended up deciding to sell our condo to my parents, so they could have a place to stay when they visited. This was an idea that I was pretty okay with, but my husband was very apprehensive about.

There is a ton more backstory that I'll address at another time (once I can think about it calmly without experiencing sudden tachycardia...) but I should have anticipated that they would ask us about everything going wrong in the condo.

For instance, this cryptic text message:
MOM: Dad said the upstairs one window can't open , who you use to help . First day OK

And then later on my husband told me that my dad had said the dishwasher was broken. There were bubbles coming out from the bottom of the dishwasher onto the floor.

"Oh," I told him, "I've made that mistake before. They just used dish soap instead of dishwasher detergent."

"No," He replied, "Your dad said that they definitely bought dishwasher detergent, and didn't use the dish soap. He said that it came in a ball, maybe one of those power ball things. I asked him to send me a picture of it, but he hasn't yet."

"Was it a lot of bubbles? Or just a little?"

"He said just a little."

"Oh, it's probably fine. Maybe it was just a one time thing. Doesn't make sense though, the dishwasher was working just fine when we left."

So I forgot about it until my husband went back to the condo to pick something up. That night I was exhausted from a long day at work and was still doing work at home, when he sat down across from me on the couch: "Come here come here, I want to show you these photos."

This was the dishwasher detergent they had been using. Good for use in high efficiency washers, I suppose. Because just like clothes, who doesn't want their dishes pro-whitened to a dazzling white?

And to be fair, there's nothing on the bottle that says it's meant for clothes washing machines, versus dish washing machines.
I mean- "regular loads"? Of what? Dishes? Or clothes?
"As with all colored loads"? I have white dishes and colored dishes. I don't usually separate them for washing, but I suppose my colored dishes could run into the whites and make them less "dazzling white."

TT;CB (Too tight; couldn't breathe)

Recently, my parents were visiting town. It was cold enough that I was wearing a Mountain Hardware down micro puff jacket that I've owned for a while, and my mom was admiring it. She was asking where she could get one too, so we took her to the Patagonia Outlet Store to see if we could find her something at a good price. She had just come from playing tennis, and was wearing a jacket over her tennis dress. I thought nothing of it until she started removing her jacket in order to try on new jackets, and I saw this:

And then I started chasing her around the store, giving her jacket back so it didn't look like she was wearing a tennis dress with no bra and gashes cut into it.

"Moooommm," I hissed at her, "What happened to your dress???"

"Oh," she replied, "It was too tight, I can't breathe."

Green Juice

Not my mom's green juice. 

Oh, lordy, how have I not written about the green juice yet? Everybody seem to be green juicing now; it's an easy way to get your greens and all the nutritious goodness that comes with that. But you see, my mom is the ultimate hipster, because she does all of these things way before everybody else is. She's been green juicing before all the cold-press juiceries started popping up in SF and raising chickens in her back yard long before it was a thing.

The thing about my mom's green juice is that... well, 1. it has lots of particulates in it, but really, 2. it tastes awful. My mom will claim that it tastes good, but unlike many juiceries who will add some fruit to make the juice taste good, this juice is just vegetables. And more vegetables. And maybe they'll throw in half a lemon too. And here's the other thing- my parents won't travel anywhere (read: my mom won't let my parents travel anywhere) without bringing green juice. So they will fly to Utah with bottles of frozen green juice to keep the rest of their groceries from California cool. They freeze it in recycled Pepsi bottles, random Nalgenes that I've left at home over the years, empty old water bottles... I had sort of gotten used to the idea, since it's been happening since I was in high school, but something about getting married gives you a second set of eyes to re-see all the things you've been seeing for years.

So this video was taken years ago, but for some reason, only now have I come across it to share with you. The beginning, you will note that my parents also brought along multiple ziplock bags full of raw veggies to cook. They have their maid/housekeeper/helper wash, dry, cut, and package it all before they travel. And then at the end, I now remember that they were visiting for the holidays, so all the junk food is being re-gifted to us from my parents. And of course, in the middle, the real star of the show:

VIVA GREEN JUICE!!!

(P.S. I make my own green smoothies now, but I like to think mine taste better than hers. Which goes to show that really, I am slowly becoming my mother.)

Getting what you paid for

The Monterey Bay Aquarium

Since my mom is a physician, as a child, many of our family trips were scheduled around her Continuing Medical Education, or CME. I remember many of these trips fondly, especially because it usually meant that we got to stay at a fancy hotel, like a Hilton, or a Hyatt. This was super cool for my sister and me, since usually on family vacations, we were sleeping either in a tent or the more run-down version of a Motel 6. One of the first of these CME trips that I remember as a child was to Monterey Bay.

It was a terrific trip. We went to the aquarium, made new friends, and my parents let my sister and I run wild in the vendor exhibit area, where we would grab free tote bags and tear around collecting as much free swag and candy as we could. Free pens? Branded post-its? Magic folding cubes? Standing desktop calendars? This was before the moratorium on pharmaceutical branded swag, so there was so much of it. It was like trick-or-treating!

Free pharma swag!!!

Our trip to Monterey Bay was also the first time I remember staying at such a nice hotel. When we entered the room, we were amazed that there were glass cups next to the sink. Not only were they glass, but they were square glass cups. We had never seen square glasses before. The towels were thick and fluffy, and there were bathrobes in the closet! It was a sort of luxury that my sister and I had never seen before.

So it was with great reluctance that we packed up all of our things in the van at the end of the trip and started the long drive back home to LA. About an hour into the drive home, I turned around the try to get something out of the back of the car. I noticed a plastic bag stuffed with square glasses, fluffy towels, and bathrobes.

"Mom...?" I yelled, "Is this from the hotel? How come it's here? We have to turn around and give them back because they'll notice that we're stealing!"

My mom paused. And then told me, "Don't worry about it. It's not stealing. That hotel was very expensive, so it's okay."

That's right, Mom. Way to stick it to the man.

Probably TMI - Underthings

One of my first memories is of when my sister and I accompanied my mom up to a lingerie counter when we were little girls. I remember her asking for a C cup, and then for bra extenders. Back then I didn't know what any of that was, but I remember asking my mom why she wore a bra. "To give clothes a nice shape," I remember her telling me.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I finally learned about bra cup sizes. First of all, most of women in my family are not very well... ahem... endowed. And there was no way in hell that my mom was a C cup. My sister and I quickly learned that my mom wore a C cup bra solely to "give her clothes a nice shape" in place of wearing a padded bra. As we got older and started wearing bras ourselves, we kept learning more things about my mom's strange undergarment habits- none illustrated so clearly as the time we all went shopping together in Taiwan.

First off, please reference these posts for examples of my mother's poor fashion choices. So one of the activities my sister and I enjoy is taking my mom shopping. We were in Taiwan when sister spotted a beautiful blue floral patterned V-necked dress. It was not a super deep V, more on the conservative side, and we knew that the belted waist would look nice on our mother. We got her in it and zipped it up, but in order to get the dress to look right, we had to tighten up her bra. Why? Because it was hanging loosely on her, riding up in the front, and peeking out the front of the V-neck. Mom- we told her, we'll buy this dress for you, but when you wear it, you HAVE to tighten up your bra or else it'll show in the front. Fine, fine, she agreed. So my sister bought her the dress. Since it was sleeveless, we even bought her a matching cardigan.

Not the actual dress, but this one is similar.

That evening, we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant with some of our relatives. Excited for our mom to wear her new outfit, we tightened up her bra and zipped her into her new dress. We did her hair and my sister put makeup on her. I probably have photos somewhere, but she looked nice. We were talking to our cousins, and when we turned around, she had her new cardigan wrapped around her neck, covering the front of her dress. Turned out that she had undone her bra, and in order to hide the fact that it was riding up her chest, draped her cardigan around her neck to hide it.

After we left the restaurant, we were like, Mooooooommm, you said you weren't going to loosen up your bra!!! That was part of the deal!

Her reply? "It was so tight! I just can't think because it's so tight!"