Twinges of Badassery

Every night when I get home from work, I make a point to do at least one thing that I hadn’t accomplished the day before. With only a month off of school, I don’t want to look back in June and think that I wasted the month with frivolous things like showering and doing laundry.

All of this buzzing around the house is typically dealing with the more boring aspects of home ownership, like fixing the garbage disposal or tightening the powder room plumbing (a friend stopped by the house last weekend, and I immediately asked for a second hand holding the sink basin – “Hi! Got a sec?”).

Interesting thing to have learned this week:  when a sink disposal gets clogged, the motor will cut off and needs to be reset (along with getting rid of whatever caused it to jam in the first place). It’s usually an easy fix, but if you have a disposal like mine, you need to use an Allen wrench to wind the motor and hit a reset button. The spot to place the wrench is pretty straightforward (hint:  it’s the hole on the bottom of the disposal). This usually frees anything that’s stuck and allows you to remove it from the sink. Once the jam is clear, run ice cubes through the disposal to sharpen the blades (plus, it gets rid of all those old refrozen ice cubes that have been lingering in your ice maker – leave them in there too long, and they can turn into one giant ice block). Until this week, I’d never “fixed’ the disposal myself before; now I feel the teensiest feeling of badass every time I run the kitchen faucet.

As glamorous as things like this are, it’s putting me in a great mood to know that the nagging things on my to-do list aren’t forced to wait, which translates into time for shopping for funky light fixtures for the study-o.

Jonathan Adler Bamboo chandelier

I’ve been on the lookout for several weeks now without success, so I need all the help I can get. Got any stores you’d like to suggest?