2001-09-13-8:20 p.m.

I've decided to make a list of all the things that are broken around here in the hope that it will somehow make me feel better.

Since Daniel threw a baseball through a window in the den we now have three broken windows. One is the window that Benjamin threw a very hard plastic brush through when he was about three or four. I put cardboard over the hole and through the years the kids have decorated it. It's a part of me now. The other hole is in our bedroom window which, when I discovered it, had a limb of a shrub growing through it.

The sprayer in my sink doesn't work except when it's in the mood. I once thought that it worked on a sort of delay, but after a while, I saw that even that was intermittent.

The sliding glass door doesn't slide. It shoves.

The toilet mechanism in the kids' bathroom has long periods of time when it hangs up several times a day. It seems to be in a non-hanging season right now for which I am grateful since sticking my hands even in the back of the toilet is not much fun for me, although it is good for my self esteem to know that I do have a little power over my toilet.

The bathtub drains so slowly that, if I want to take a bath, I have to monitor the water level of the kids' baths and allow enough time between theirs and mine for water drainage or bale into the toilet. We've even had the drain looked at by a professional and the condition has been pronounced terminal. Terminal tub draining slowness. Every time I bale out the tub I think to myself, this is one of those things I'll have to disclose if we ever sell our house.

The locks on our car don't work. They used to sort of work. You had to do them all manually, which is pretty good exercise in a suburban. But then we spent $700 to have them fixed and now they're broken again and you can't even do them manually. So our $700 of research has told us that it wasn't the locks that needed fixing. It was the main something or other that's burning out the other thingies. Now I can't leave my valuables in the car when I go to garage sales anymore.

A drawer in my refrigerator has never worked. I think if I read the manual that came with the refrigerator I could probably figure out what's wrong, but what are the chances that I'll actually do that?

Okay. I think I feel better now. Griping. It's a good thing.

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