Our Fixtures: A Long Blog About Not Much

I have been discovering that our fixtures, specifically our toilet and washing machine, have personalities.
Generally, I get along really well with our washing machine: it’s fairly new- only a few years old, has easy-touch buttons, and is quite a pretty little thing. The only drawback (unavoidable, really) is that all of the buttons and settings are in Japanese; however, I have figured out the basics, and so doing laundry has become a matter of pushing a few buttons and hanging it up when it’s finished. The great part is that it sings to me when it’s done it work – what hausfrau wouldn’t be content with such a happy machine? But today was a different story; today my washing machine was cranky. I decided some time ago that it was time to do a load of delicates. So, I nicely prepared and even asked our Japanese teacher what setting it was. She drew the Kanji for me and I was all set: except that my washing machine seemed to have different ideas. The setting that was supposed to be delicates just churned the clothes a bit and then gave up; I tried three or four other settings: some were quite harsh and painful on my poor clothes, others didn’t even bother trying. And what is usually a happy beeping song at the end of the load turned into an “I’m going to explode” beeping sound. In the end, I gave up, and washed them all by hand.
Our toilet is quite another story: on the whole, it’s just plain greedy. Our bathroom is quite tiny: it feels a bit like using an airplane bathroom. The upside is that it’s a cinch to clean; the downside is that there just isn’t room to move or to store our toiletries: shaving cream, brushes, toothbrushes, hair products. It has forced us (and me especially) to become quite the minimalists in terms of the products we use. And so, out of necessity, our toilet top became our only storage. A few months ago, Rod got smart, and bought a shelf and put it up with adhesive tape. Unfortunately, the tape decided to stop working, and so we were woken up in the middle of the night with a crash, smash and splash! Our toilet had tasted its first of our products. That was the start of an insatiable appetite. Rod nicely put the shelf up again, but the same thing happened shortly after. And so, we reverted back to our toilet-top shelf. Now the problem has become that it is a mite crowded, so often when we reach for something, another product must give…and it ends up in the unquenchable jaws of our toilet.
The joys of living!