WHOA, WHOA, WHOA!!!

We didn't think there'd be anything to report until Monday, but we were wrong. So very wrong.

Simple things first that we haven't thought to include before, like... Carla's chandelier! Carla thought it'd be cute to have a little chandelier over the sink. I smiled politely and said "yes dear". At least, that's how I remember it. Anyway, it's on order and hasn't shown up yet, so the electricians installed their own version, which I much prefer:

The reason was that if we should get inspected, this will pass rather than having bare, hot wires sticking out of the ceiling. I told the plumber that we had to cut costs somewhere, and this was the result.

Since the cabinets are mostly complete, Carla decided to move the pantry items from the dining room table into the new pantry. This was a good time to purge some things, like this box of whatever it was...

...that had an expiration date of January 2004.

After dinner we decided to try out the new washer & dryer. I got a load of jeans, fired up the HAL-9000 of washers, and sat back. I commented a couple of times on how quiet it was. Then the rinse cycle started. This is a 4 second exposure of me wraslin' with the severely unbalanced washer as it tried to make its getaway.

Wikipedia defines 'whoa' as: "an exclamation predominantly used to command pack and draft animals to stop, and is most commonly applied to horses. Whoa can also refer to a general expression of surprise or amazement". We were on the other side of the kitchen when this first happened and I was saying "whoa, whoa, whoa" as I ran across the room. This tickled Carla. I think it was an appropriate exclamation considering the circumstances.

I'm not sure what the W/D combo weighs, but it was pretty light on its feet during our tango. I stopped it and took out half of the load. Same thing. I stopped it and took out everything, ran smooth as could be. 3 pair of jeans cannot be responsible for this. Something has to be wrong. Back to the manual...

When we were putting in the W/D, John looked at a tag on the back and said it's about the optional pedestal, which it was:

HOWEVER, if you kept reading, it had some important tidbits, :

Like "REMOVE SHIPPING BOLTS".

--- later that night --- 

This is what came out of the back of the washer:

For some reason, the washer ran much better after these came out of it. In this day of .10 cent electronics, why can't a single use switch be used with one of these to NOT run the washer if it isn't removed? The washer communicates with the dryer to transfer load information for drying time, but the washer can't tell me there are 4 8" bolts sticking in its backside? C'mon GE!

Anyway, everything is fine, we've done a couple of loads of laundry, the weekend is over and it's time to go back to work.

Oh, we didn't win PowerBall last night either.