Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Median U.S. Net Worth: I’m Shocked!

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Shocked, I tell you!

Have you seen Ali’s post at Anything You Want, ruminating about how our net worth compares to the typical American figures?

Holy maquerel! The graph she posts shows that at the height of one’s earning power, age 65-69, the median net worth — including the value of one’s home! — is $194,226. Exclude the dwelling’s value, and you see net holdings (presumably including depreciating assets such as vehicles) of $43,921.

{hyperventilates}

As DC at Young Adult Money remarks, it’s kind of pointless to compare one’s net worth with the median, or for that matter with any other individual’s, because we can’t really know the factors that bear on the figures.

But I think it is useful — and interesting — to consider the relative poverty that faces 21st-century Americans. No, we’re not trolling through the garbage dumps in Bangladesh…but there is simply no way anyone can go into retirement with 43 grand in savings without looking at a future of real poverty. Social Security would help, but it would not keep the wolf far from the door of a person with so little net savings.

My father, who was a Merchant Marine deck officer, figured he could retire when he had accumulated $100,000. That blessed day came in 1962. Actually, by then he had enough to buy a home and a car in cash and still have a hundred grand left, plus enough to send me to college (in those days four years at a state university cost about $4,000). Today a hundred thousand 1962 dollars would be worth about $783,440.

And I’ll tell you somethin’: my father spent the last years of his life in poverty.

He didn’t bargain on the rampant inflation of the 1970s. By 1975, the $100,000 in his bank had the buying power of 56,134 1962 dollars.

Interestingly, that still is more than the median savings of a 21st-century American on the cusp of retirement.

As of December 2014, my savings amount to less than the 2014 equivalent of my father’s retirement savings, but  with the value of the paid-off house added in, the net worth comes to a heckuva lot more than his ever did.

But. All it would take is one period of crazy inflation — and don’t fool yourself; it can and will happen again — to put me in the poorhouse.

One of Those ARRRRGGGH!@#$%^ Days

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Have you ever noticed how everything always happens at once? Wonder why that is…

This has been one of those uphill-haul days, wherein every single damnfool thing you want to do has to be done the hard way, and you have a LOT of damnfool things to do.

That’s because you’ve left the damnfool things to do another day and, yes, this is another day.

I cruise back into town after this morning’s networking group meeting, having heard an excellent presentation and been the target of a rousing pep talk, after the meeting, by the presenter himself. I’m hot to get to work and full of ideas. But first…

But first, I  have to go by the electric supply house and pick up the lamp that was left to be rewired by way of repairing Ruby’s latest cord-eating depredation. It looks nice, and they charge me less than a quarter of what the last predator charged.

But…

Yeah. You get what you pay for. Twelve dollars and change does not enough wire to reach the outlet purchase.

The damn wire is about four inches too short.

I call. They agree to rewire it.

But this entails trying to get across Conduit of Blight Boulevard AGAIN. As you may recall, the city is building a ridiculous lightrail line up Conduit of Blight, making the entire corridor nonnavigable and rerouting rush-hour traffic through the middle of our neighborhood. You cannot get across Conduit of Blight at Main Drag South at all. So you have to drive up to Main Drag North, taking you way afield of the electric outfit, or else you have to drive two miles to the south and one mile back north  — three miles out of your way — to get around the construction horrors. Make that three miles x two, if you have any designs on coming home.

Either way, the environmentally chummy public works project converts a four-mile drive into a six-mile drive. One way.

I decide to drive up to the Depot and just buy a damn extension cord. There I pay almost nine bucks for a six-foot piece of overkill.

While I’m there, I return the hose connector that the very nice sales clerk told me was a set — male and female — and that was not. Whatever it was, it was not what I wanted. It was unusable.

I hate shopping in Home Depot. Hate it hate it hate it HATE. IT. Today there’s not a soul, not even an incompetent wretch who has no idea what she’s talking about, to help. I find the paint roller I need (only because past safaris have taken me into the Veldt of Paint) but have a bitch of a time finding the extension cords, which are nowhere near where two of the worthy employees pointed me.

When I get the eventually found extension cord home and discombulate its intricate packaging, I see it has a connection that would accommodate enough plugs to light a half-a-dozen Christmas trees.

Come ON, guys. This is for ONE freaking LIVING ROOM LAMP. And I have to tape it to the floor, the table, and the wall so as to keep Ruby from eating the lamp cord for the fourth time. A big honking clunky umpteen-plug connection does not lend itself to discretion. Or to transparent packing tape.

Two choices now: Take the lamp back to French Electric and wait another week to get it rewired again, or take the lamp cord back to HD and try to find one that works.

I believe the Depot does not have regular lamp-cord sized extensions, because two HD Dudes tried to help me find the same. We all failed.

Finally I decide to check the local TruValue and, if I can find a normal 1950s-style lamp cord with one count it (1) plug on the end, I will keep the short cord on the lamp and defer returning the ridiculous extension to a day when I’m in the vicinity of an HD for some other constructive reason.

Over to the TruValue. Yes, they have such a thing: four dollah.

Climbing into my car, it occurs to me that Home Depot is upselling by quite deliberately NOT STOCKING lamp-sized extension cords.

It is hot, and it is humid. By hot we’re talkin’ upwards of a hundred degrees.

As per usual, every moron in the county gets in front of me on the road. How the HELL do they KNOW when I’m out?

The last time Ruby ate the living-room lamp cord, I moved another lamp in there and used transparent packing tape to stick the cord to the inside of the table leg, the floor, and the wall between the lamp and the light plug. This a) worked and b) was very easy.

Not so today.

It may a) work, but it was b) incredibly NOT very easy. I ended up with broken fingernails from trying to peel the damn tape off of the damn roll and wads of stuck-together tape strewn all over the living room floor. By the time the job was done, my hair was yanked and my teeth were ground.

While I was at the electric supply store, we tried to remove the lamp shade. The finial was frozen on. None of us could get it loose. But we did succeed in ripping the fabric.

This lampshade was purchased back when I had a job and could afford nice things.

I get on Amazon to try to find something comparable. The cheapest selection: Seventy-five dollah!

Holy shit.

I take a more or less functional lampshade off another lamp (which now goes naked) and put it on the repaired lamp. It looks like what it is: a cheap piece of junk from Target.

Lurking at the back of consciousness: Pay the $1,588 Medigap premium! Find out how far in hock you are to AMEX! Figure out where the money to pay these extravagant bills will come from!

AMEX? Exactly $1,000 over budget. That is twice the amount I paid on the shoe extravaganza. We will have to wait for the itemized bill to arrive to figure out the other charges.

The Medigap premium, surprisingly considering the past year’s medical misadventures, is inflated by less than $100 over the 2014 gouge. And of course, it’s allowed for in the annual budget. But still. Fifteen hundred and eight-eight dollars is fucking painful.

Because I had a meeting halfway across the city at this morning’s crack of dawn, I have not cleaned the pool pump pot, which must be cleaned every morning because the fucking palm trees cannot be trimmed because DUCK has taken up residence in the tree trimmers’ direct line of fire. DUCK is absent this afternoon, it being afternoon and the time at which she forages. Does she not KNOW about the damned garden slugs that overrun the yard at night and that are turning the basil plant into a skeleton of itself? Why is she not doing her DUCK job out there? And where the Hell is she, anyway?

One of the eggs DUCK has hidden lies exposed. What part of “grackle” does DUCK not understand?

Avian concerns, however, do not form a major part of today’s Day from Hell qualities.

Web Guru’s bill needs to be paid. I try to get online to pay this quarter’s bill. His auto-collect software wants me to sign  in as…HIM!

Naturally.

I crash out of his auto-collect software and reboot. Now it tells me I owe an extra payment, which I happen to know I paid.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to cook my lunch, it being 3 o’clock in the afternoon and only slightly past lunchtime, by a mere three hours. Trusty Kitchen Timer is called into action to remind me when X or Y minutes have passed, so the grill will not carbonize the food.

Trusty Kitchen Timer is killed in action.

I try to revive her by replacing her battery.

No dice. TKT is deader than a doornail.

Why doornails are said to be dead is a question that has always plagued me, given that a) I do not know what a doornail is and b) I can’t imagine why anyone would impute either life or death to such an object.

So it goes.

The work I intended to get done was not, repeat, NOT done by 4 p.m., when I shook off the worst of this miasma. Instead of doing anything meaningful, I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day formatting another Fire-Rider episode.

And so…into the fog.

 

 

 

Handyman Pays for Himself…and Doesn’t Even Charge!!

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Zowie! Yesterday Larry Goldstein of Preferred Handyman Services, who came highly recommended on Angie’s List, dropped by to peruse the growing list of honey-do’s that need some skilled attention. He looks at the half-a-page of chores and projects, advises me on where to take the ones he doesn’t want to do (apparently painting the outside of houses in 110-degree heat is not among his preferred services), writes down what’s needed for the projects he will do, and says he’ll e-mail me with an estimate.

While he’s inspecting, I mention that the patio table jiggles so violently it threatens to collapse. It has these little cap-shaped bolt things that appear to hold it together, but I can’t tighten them with my fingers and if there’s a tool for them, I have NO idea what it might be.

He explains that the cap-shaped bolt things ARE caps, and flips off a couple to illustrate. Underneath is a round bolt thing that has to be turned with an Allen wrench. He tightens a couple of them and then proceeds on his inspection tour.

P1030493I think…hmmm….  I have a whole package of Allen wrenches out there in the garage somewhere. Bookmark that thought.

Meanwhile, on his way out the door he repairs the laundry faucet and shows me how to turn off the water to that sink in the absence (yes!) (no…don’t ask) of a shut-off valve.

As he’s headed for his truck I say, “Let me pay you for your trip over here.” He says, “Oh, no. That’s not a problem.” I think oooookkkaaayyyy… I was prepared to shell out $60 plus parts just to have him schlep over here and do the most urgent repair — which was that faucet.

Well, I have yet to hear back from him. I hope he resurfaces, because I think he may be God.

This morning, of course, the table still jiggled under my breakfast plate, because once he realized I knew what an Allen wrench is and that I had a lifetime supply of the things, he also realized this was a job I could do. So I grabbed a slot screwdriver, flipped off the li’l caps, found the right size Allen wrench, and voilà!

It was amazingly easy.  And now the table is rock-solid.

Remember the time Ruby ate the lamp cord? I took it over to Hinckley’s, the nearest lamp repair joint I know. They charged $50 to rewire the damn lamp. Within two weeks after I put it back on the table, she chewed the cord off again! That was after I’d sprayed it liberally with Bitter Apple. Well, I could not afford another fifty bucks for another eight feet of puppy fodder, so replaced my favorite living-room lamp with an old clunker from a back room and taped the cord down with clear cellophane shipping tape.

P1030494
Nice decorator touch, eh?

So I asked Larry if he would rewire the lamp while he was puttering with some of the other chores. He says, “Well, they’ll do it for you at French’s.”

I say, “Seriously? I wondered if they would but was afraid to ask. Thought they might be insulted, since…that’s not what they do.” French’s is probably the premier electric supply house in the city — it caters largely to the trade.

“Sure,” he says. “Mike will do it, and if he won’t, John* will.” So he gets on the phone and calls these guys up and asks if they’ll rewire a lamp. Mike says sure, he’ll do it.

How much?

“Ten bucks.”

Holy mackerel.

“Remember to remind them that I sent you.” He hands me a business card to be sure I won’t forget his name.

So the guy saved me the cost of a plumber’s trip, the cost of a new faucet, and $40 on the lamp rewire…and he charged me nothing!

How incredible IS that?
_______
*Probably not their real names. There’s a reason he figured he’d better give me a bidness card…

Current Events and the State of One’s Sanity

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I think my brain has turned itself upside down. Have you read the news over the past couple of days? The current Current Events are enough to make you crazy.

In the first place, I must confess that I have thought the flap over white cops shooting black men has been strenuously overblown. Puh-leeeze! If you decide to knock over a convenience store and rough up a clerk and challenge a cop who comes after you, you can’t be surprised when you get shot, no matter what your racial persuasion. And you might want to think about the potential risks before you let your kid go outside and wave a convincingly realistic-looking toy gun around a public park. But what happened in South Carolina yesterday raises some real questions about that line of thinking.

In case you haven’t pulled your head out from under the pillow this morning: a police officer stopped a driver because one of the driver’s tail lights was out. An altercation ensued in which the officer tased the driver, who turned and ran off. The officer fired eight shots, at least one of which hit the man in the back and killed him. The officer happened to be white; the driver happened to be black.

The officer claims he felt his life was threatened. Exactly how a man who’s fleeing you at a dead run, with his back turned to you and with no gun in his hand, could be much of a threat…that remains unexplained. Was the man a threat to public safety? Well…a healthy and vigorous adult male human being can wreak a fair amount of mayhem without benefit of any kind of armament. But lacking a gun and lacking any reason to beat up on anyone: one wonders.

So…we killed this guy because he ran away (his brother claims he probably was afraid of going to jail for failing to pay child support) after we stopped him over a tail light???

We stopped him over a dead tail light? Really? Seriously?

Let me ask you, my white brethren and sistern, how often has a police officer passed his time arresting you because one (count it, 1) of your tail lights was not working? As you know, I drive a junker. Just the other day when I took the Dog Chariot in for some maintenance work, WonderMechanic’s guys changed a tail light that they noticed was out. I knew the plastic cover was cracked — has been for quite some time (as in months and months) — but was trying to pretend I didn’t know the light was out. I pass quite a few of Arizona’s Finest as I make my way over the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Nary a one of them has even turned a hair at the blank tail light, much less tried to shoot me over it.

Maybe the rattletrap cars of elderly white women are less of a threat to public safety than the rattletrap cars of middle-aged black men?

Funny makes a sharp left turn.

Let  us pour another cup of coffee and turn the page. Along about page 18, we come upon this blood-roiling headline:

Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Death of Family of 8

Dayum! That evil utility company!

The story of the man who poisoned himself and his seven kids by running an electric generator indoors has been framed in this way repeatedly: about 95 percent of the reports I’ve read imply that the cruel utility company cut off the family’s power and left them to die in the cold cold Maryland springtime.

As it develops, however, the victim had never even requested electric power service to the rental home. They moved in there last November — five months ago — and never ran up a dime’s worth of (legal) electric bills. Not, we learn, because the generator powered the home’s heater through the winter, but because Dad was an accomplished thief. He had stolen an electric meter, hooked it up on the QT, and was ripping off power from the utility company. Evidently he couldn’t afford power bills because he was trying to support seven children on minimum wage.

One of the conservative themes that I find especially revolting in the 21st-century national conversation is the idea that if you’re poor, it’s all your fault: poor people are, in this train of thought, lazy no-good bums who refuse to get off their duffs, and they deserve to live in poverty.

But… It’s very hard to push away the unkind question: what would possess you to have seven children if all you can earn is minimum wage? Minimum wage in this country isn’t enough to support one person, much less eight people. What part of birth control do you not understand? Does your zipper fall down on its own?

One of the deceased father’s friends asked “How can a man survive off of basically minimum wage with seven kids, and you can’t help him with a utility bill?”

It is not in any way self-evident that a utility company should donate support for the vast brood spawned by a man who can’t keep a grip on his procreative urges. Avoiding pregnancy is just not that hard.

No, it’s not the kids’ fault that they were born. It’s the fault — and the responsibility — of only two people: their parents.

Funny veers to the right.

Craziness to the left of us. Craziness to the right of us. We live in a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

So it goes…

Stupid Animal Stories…

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That would be “Stupid Human Stories,” actually. Over at the Corgi forum, some of the enthusiasts are grousing about the overall stupidity of the people who show up at dog parks with their pooches in tow. LOL!

I don’t take my dogs to dog parks, first because of the risk of injury, but also because of the concentration of various doggy pathogens — more than one vet has inveighed, over the years, against visiting these places. As one of the corgistis remarks, though, the biggest risk at dog parks (and just about anywhere else) is not from the dogs but from the idiot dog owners.

No doubt I’ve already told the story here of Anna, the loose mutt, the four-year-old, and the moron father. The child survived, but only by the grace of God. And ahh, yes, we have the moron parents down the street who leave their kid alone in the front yard with their German shepherd, which — quite reasonably — defends its kid from all comers.

Looks benign, doesn't she?
Looks benign, doesn’t she?

So commonplace that they’re beneath mention are the Cheerful Chuckleheads who let their little yappers lunge up to your German shepherd (who privately is thrilled, for reasons both humans and dogoids are too dumb to guess).

“Oh, Fifi wants to say hello!” cries CC.

DogAttackUSAF)
…or so you think…

“You might want to keep your dog back a bit,” the GerShep’s pet human replies.

“She just wants to play.”

Really? My dog wants something, too: to have your dog’s head stuffed and hung as a trophy on the wall over her dog dish…

Gaaaaaaaahhhhh!

But you haven’t seen stupid humans until you’ve seen stupid humans around horses. My god! Horses bring out the most baroque forms of human stupidity.

Case in point: moi.

quarterhorse Barrel_racingBack in the Middle Cretaceous, when I was in graduate school, some occasion arose in which my then-husband and I invited the chair of my department, his tartly unhappy wife  and their daughter, then about ten, to spend a day at our ranch, a garden spot that resided up a little past lovely Yarnell. Why, I do not remember and I cannot even begin to imagine. But there it was. Chairman Marvin, Mrs. Marvin, and Kid out on a working cattle ranch just below the Mogollon Rim.

If only I could remember what I was smoking…maybe I could get some more of it…

For reasons even more opaque, we somehow suggested that this crew should take a horsie ride.

The Hassayampa River flowed right through our deeded land. It passed by the cluster of buildings that included the house, the foreman’s house and bunkhouse, and the barns. Very, very lovely: riparian high desert, full of birds and little animals and watercress growing in the trickling water beneath vast shady cottonwoods. To die for.

Indeed.

Nothing would do but what we had to saddle up and ride along the cattle trace that follows the Hassayampa easterly toward Crown King. Of course, we’d have to stop at the bob-wire fence between our ranch and the Smoketree, the neighboring ranch. But that was a good thing.

In what at first glance seems amazingly stupid but what turned out to be the one tiny glimmer of sense any of us evinced, I suggested the girl, who’d never been on a horse in her life, should ride with me on our quarterhorse Babe. I proposed we should ride bareback, because a) this is a good first step in learning to sit a horse and b) it meant I could have her in front of me with me hanging on to her, rather than having her perched on a saddle behind me, supposedly hanging onto me. It also meant I could see her and watch her every minute.

So it went.

All right. We’re riding along this narrow trail, single-file, beside the Hassayampa. The river doesn’t flow continuously, nor does any part of it flow all year round. But now and again it does produce ferocious, astonishing, jaw-dropping flash floods. Over the decades, these have excavated a channel that drops the riverbed about three to six feet below the surrounding terrain. We are riding along the edge of the bank that borders this drop-off. Below us, the river bottom is a chaos of rocks, boulders, old shattered tree trunks, washed-away Model T’s, and similar debris.

As we’re going along, Marvin keeps letting his horse come right up on Babe’s rear end. Babe does not like this. Neither do I.

I tell Marvin, imagining (wrongly) that he can figure out how to rein in a horse, to keep his horse back off Babe’s rump. I tell him that Babe will kick if he doesn’t hold his horse back a few feet. Three times I tell him this, and three times he lets the gelding creep up and stick his nose up Babe’s tail.

Finally, Babe loses patience. She picks the psychological moment — just as the trail teeters on the knife-edge of the river’s bank — to haul off and belt Marvin’s nag.

Of course, Marvin’s horse shies. Babe does a little jig and, well, yes: she stumbles off the side and starts to fall.

I drop the reins, wrap both arms around the kid, and throw myself off Babe, hauling the girl with me. With me doing the best I can to protect the child’s head and neck, we hit the ground about five feet from Babe, who tumbles off the riverbank into the dry riverbed.

Shee-ut.

Mercifully, no one was  hurt. Babe got up, miraculously uninjured, and allowed me to retrieve her without further incident.

Don’t know when I’ve ever been so furious. The rage didn’t kick in until after I saw that Babe hadn’t, after all, broken a leg (as I assumed she would while the girl and I were rolling away from ruckus).

But of course, Marvin was my boss so I couldn’t tell him what a moron he was.

But of course, the real moron was not on Marvin’s horse. The real moron was on my horse. The one in charge of my horse.

What on earth was I thinking when I asked Marvin “do you know how to ride a horse,” heard him answering tentatively — tentatively swaggering — “oh, sure; oh yeah,” recognized that as a ridiculous exaggeration, and acquiesced to it? What was I thinking when I put a ten-year-old on a cow pony, bareback, and climbed up behind her? Oh, hell: what was I thinking when I invited the effete chair of the department up to the ranch to start with?????

So there you are. Stupid is as stupid does. I account it as some kind of miracle that the child wasn’t hurt, the horse wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t hurt. God watches over children and fools.

Image: Hassayampa River: Todd’s Desert Hiking Guide. Yes, it looked exactly like that.

How to Get Sand Out of a Top-Loading HE Washer

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Here in urban Arizona, we homeowners have something called “desert landscaping.” This is some Easterner’s idea of an approximation of what the Sonoran Desert looks like: a load of gravel spread over the yard and punctuated with a few cacti, a palm tree or two, and an ocotillo. Since the cost of watering a lawn easily exceeds a summer air-conditioning bill (which can be whopping!), this type of xeriscaping is cost-effective, if not what you’d call aesthetically awe-inspiring.

Quarter-Inch-Minus-Sand-150x150An alternative to the ugly, footpad-piercing gravel is a product called “quarter-minus.” This stuff appears to be a by-product of sand-and-gravel operations: it’s a blend of finely crushed granite and gritty stuff that looks a lot like sand. Quarter-minus has three advantages: piled on deep enough, it inhibits weed growth; it vaguely resembles the desert floor (sure does that better than gravel, anyway); and after it’s been watered or rained on a few times, it packs down into a hard surface that your dogs can walk around on. This latter obviates their getting mud all over their feet and tracking it into the house.

“Mud” in Arizona is not your ordinary East-Coast mud. The soil here has a lot of clay — in its extreme form, it creates a kind of hardpan called caliche. This stuff is sticky. When the dog tracks regular wet dirt into the kitchen, the stuff adheres to the tile flooring like paint. You literally have to get down on hands and knees and scour it off. It will not wipe up with a rag or paper towel — you have to use a scrub brush or one of those sponges with a scouring pad on the back.

This is a good reason to put quarter-minus in the back yard. If you’re a dog owner, that is. And if your dog is, say, NOT a corgi puppy.

Ruby the Corgi Puppy, being a high-energy sort of soul, is given to chasing around the yard like a rocket with Cassie. And Cassie, being a corgi herself, is also a bit of a rocket. They’ve built a race track around one of the orange trees. Where they’ve established their route, the quarter-minus is churned up and loose. And that means whenever it gets wet, they track a film of fine sand into the kitchen.

This vacuums up, but it’s a nuisance. So I put a little bathroom rug in front of the kitchen door, which works well to shake off and collect the sand.

The other day one of the dogs wuffed on the rug, so I put it in the accursed Samsung washer. And it came out just fine, since it’s flat. Flat things are the only things the Samsung will run through an entire wash cycle without disgorging them in the form of braids.

A few days later, I decided to toss a pair of jeans that I’d worn just a couple of hours into the rinse-&-spin cycle, knowing this would shake out the wrinkles and give me another wearing before I actually had to wash the things by hand, as I now have to wash everything that’s not flat by hand. Twenty minutes later, I come back to retrieve the pants and…WH-A-A-A?????

They’re covered in mud.

Not mud, exactly: SAND.

Sand has run out into the utility sink, into which the used washer water drains, and left a structure that looks like a sand bar on the bottom of it.

Lovely.

Not only that, but the entire inside of the washer is full of sand.

I get out the shop vac and vacuum out the sand, running the nozzle not only over the bottom but all over the tub’s walls, hoping to suck out whatever sand is caught in the little holes that perforate the tub’s side from top to bottom. I fill a scrub bucket with cold water and attempt to rinse the sand out of my jeans.

Then I run the pants through the washer again, only on a full “Quick Wash” cycle. In the wondrous world of HE washers, “quick” means 45 minutes. I figure an endless slosh like this should knock the remaining sand out of the jeans and rinse it out of the washer.

Three-quarters of an hour later…

The jeans are still full of sand, and so is the washer.

Now what?

I wipe out the washer with a microfiber rag, put the jeans to soak with some detergent in a bucketful of water and run the “Bedding” cycle with the machine empty. “Bedding” is the only cycle that causes the Samsung to dispense enough water to actually clean a load of wash, more or less. The “Bedding” cycle takes an hour and ten minutes to run. Maybe, I hope, that much water slopping around that long will be enough to wash the sand out.

Well. No.

I wipe down the inside of the washer tub again, rinse out the soapy jeans in the sink, drop them back into the washer, and run “Bedding” again.

Have you counted up the amount of time we’re at now? One rinse, two “quick” washes, two bedding cycles: that adds up to 4.17 hours of run time. That doesn’t count the time spent vacuuming and wiping down the washer and manually rinsing sand out of the clothing.

The jeans come out again with sand in them, but less of it: I’m able to shake most of it out in the backyard.

The inside of the washer is still coated with sand. YouTube’s repair dudes and DIY mavens suggest this is not a good state of affairs: sand in the pump will, of course, grind up its innards.

Apparently I’m going to be  buying another new washer sooner than expected. Hope I can find a cheaper one with a rinse-only cycle…

How to get this stuff out?

Now I raid the linen closet and haul out four large towels, one of them a gigantic Costco beach towel. These I dump into the washer with a generous slug of home-made fabric softener (hair conditioner diluted with water works as well as fabric softener and it doesn’t stink). Run it all through on “Bedding” again, the second-longest cycle the Samsung provides.

This seems to work. There’s still some sand in the washer, but a lot less. I shake out the towels in the backyard, attempting to dislodge as much sand as possible. Wipe out the inside of the washer again. Toss them back into the washer. Run the washer again.

By the time the mountain of towels came out the second time, most of the sand was out of the washer. Not all of it, by any means. But most of it.

That’s 6.51 hours — almost seven hours of running the washer trying to get the sand out of it!

Holy mackerel! What would you do if you lived near a beach? Just keep buying new $1500 washers every six months or so? Learn to replace the pump yourself and keep a lifetime supply of the things in the garage?

Ain’t life grand in the highly efficient 21st century ?