First parenthood-inspired organizational blunder

I have a whole host of blog posts in the works on topics such as what to take to the hospital (in retrospect), c-section recovery, NICU culture and blessings in disguise, gear to have on hand for a newborn, etc., but for now I'll interrupt my "regularly scheduled post" to share this little gem.

The long and short of it is that for the basically the first time in my life I missed a deadline. Specifically, my car is up for its state inspection every December, and this year's inspection just happened to take place on Jan. 24 (this Monday). Whoops.

The best part of the story is that I did not even realize (nor did Matt, for what it's worth) that my car was well overdue for its inspection until we took it to a repair shop on Monday. You may recall that there is only one place in my 2003 Mazda Protege where our daughter's car seat will fit -- that would be directly behind the front passenger's seat. Unfortunately, this is also adjacent to the only door in the car in which the power lock is broken. After taking about two car rides as a family we decided enough is enough, we'd have to suck it up and pay the $250 to have the door taken apart and the power lock fixed. (Fortunately, this was $200 cheaper than the estimate we'd been given at our usual auto-repair shop, so we drove across town to the cheaper repair shop, newborn in tow.)

Of course, when you drop off your car for any maintenance, the repair people inevitably have about 20 other items they find that you could fix. In my case, the fact that they caught that I needed a state inspection was legitimately important. The fact that my car would not have passed the inspection due to nearly dead brakes was also slightly important. And the fact that I legitimately needed maintenance such as a transmission fluid flush also ranks up there on the importantness scale. Matt and I plan to keep my car alive for as long as possible, so we're viewing routine maintenance as rather critical. His car (a two-door) will be the one to go when it's time to upgrade.

So, $900 worth of car repairs four days after bringing our newborn home from the hospital wasn't what we'd bargained for, but I suppose that's just what happens sometimes.

And now, of course, inside our house the basement door is having trouble locking and unlocking thanks to the cold weather, and two of the toilets in our house that have never caused us problems in five years are starting to run whenever they gosh darn feel like it. It's amazing that none of these things happened when I was waiting for Natalie to arrive.

Homeowner duties: window screen repair

You never really take a moment to reflect on every last detail that comes with a house until you own one, or at least I didn't. One of these discoveries happened this weekend, when Matt and I attempted to check off one seemingly small item off our home-improvement list.

I bet you haven't devoted too much of your life to thinking about window screens. Me neither.

We only had to think about window screens because we own dogs, and those dogs have long toe nails, even though we get them trimmed with regularity. Those toe nails create scrapes on the window screens, which turn into tears, which let in bugs and defeat the purpose of even having window screens.

Or, in this case, to be precise, two window screens and one sliding door screen.

Guilty: Window screen destroyers!

So we called Home Depot.

"Do you repair window screens?"

"No, but here's the name of a guy who does."

Then we called Lowes.

"Hey Lowes, do you repair window screens?"

Ten minutes later, same answer: "no."

We took the Home Depot suggestion and found ourselves this morning in front of a Public Storage unit where a man keeps all his window-screen repair supplies. One hour and one trip to Starbucks later, we had ourselves three newly covered window screens. The entire operation set us back $90. I realize this isn't chump change, and maybe with greater planning and research I could have figured this out and DIYed it, but it just wasn't going to happen this time.

A key to successful home ownership is knowing your strengths and what you can take on. There are lots of times when I want to do something myself, and with a little extra effort, I usually succeed. But then there are times like this when Matt and I find ourselves driving down the road, his hatch back completely up with three window screens sticking out the back on our way to some random storage unit because we'd rather let someone else do it.

And now, something you won't see in our window: unnecessary quotation marks!

Vacuum repair and faith in humanity

About two weeks after I raved about all our great finds on Craigslist, including our Dyson vacuum cleaner, it stopped working, right as Matt was tidying up before his book club meeting at our house. (Yes, both Matt and I participate in book clubs...separate book clubs....separate all-female book clubs, with Matt being the exceptional male member.)

The Dyson was making a horrible noise and generally not doing its one job as a vacuum cleaner. It sucked, or rather, it stopped sucking.

Matt got on the phone with Dyson, grabbed some tools and dismantled the vacuum, while the person at Dyson walked him through the repair process. Mid-call Matt asked me to come downstairs to see if my tiny hands could get to some tiny vacuum-cleaner parts. I failed, and we scratched our heads as we felt like we could not follow simple directions, and the guy on the phone kept saying, "All you have to do is...it should be right in front of you." We should just return all our college degrees.

So Matt called back and got a different Dyson whiz. This is always a good rule to follow when dealing with any form of customer service in which you are not getting your way. And, true to form, by dealing with another person we got another set of answers. Turns out our Dyson model (DC-17 Allergen originally purchased in May 2008) had been recalled because of a problem with the belt, the same problem we were having, and the reason why we were unable to do the repair ourselves (this also made us feel less dumb).

The reason we didn't know about the recall? We weren't contacted because we aren't the vacuum cleaner's original owners. Enter problem number 2.

The lady on the phone told us we could take the vacuum to a repair shop and have it fixed free of charge because it's under the five-year warranty. But the warranty is nontransferable and she said they wouldn't take it. She said, "You could see if the original owner is willing to get it repaired." Then she probably chuckled to herself, "Good luck with that." This did not stop us.

Matt archives everything he gets in Gmail. He archived his emails with the guy who sold us our Dyson on Craigslist, lovely Howard. So Matt calls Howard. Shockingly, Howard returns Matt's voicemail. Then even more shockingly, lovely Howard is nice enough to agree to call Dyson himself, complain of the problem, and put the gears in motion for the repair.

Yesterday while Matt was out running errands he picked up our Dyson from the repair shop, and I am pleased to report the vacuum cleaner is functioning even better than it did before. Now, intense vacuuming is about to commence.

Lovely Howard, you are a rare gem of Craigslist. May you be blessed with many perfectly functioning appliances for the rest of your life.

If that doesn't restore your faith in humanity, I don't know what will.