Friday, November 24, 2017

A California Thanksgiving

Tuesday night before most of our house was slated to leave for Thanksgiving, a circuit burst in our kitchen.
Tuesday night was full of many other things as well. Where many people, I assume, would’ve preferred packing and such, we gathered to celebrate a housemate’s birthday as well as for our monthly Spirituality night. Both of those things were great! I must stress again how lucky I am that my housemates are such good cooks, and listening to people share their stories is always something that makes me feel closer to them.
But yeah, the busted circuit.
The whole plan was that after our night of dinner and sharing, people would have time to pack. Most everyone was leaving in the morning, between the hours of 5 and 8, and due to the long day of work followed by the busy evening, that hadn’t really happened.
We loaded the dishwasher after our meal and realized it wasn’t turning on, but like, that was before spirituality night so we had to save that problem for later. Only, later, we realized that our garbage disposal was not working either, nor were some of the plugs by the sink, and so the conclusion was that a circuit has gone dark.
(Note me using various words to say that it was broken because I don’t know the actual circuit terminology. Off? Flipped? Blew? That one sounds right. It’s in my head somewhere but I’m too lazy to Google it.)
Exhausted both physically from our day and emotionally from the spirituality night, it was really not the best time for us to realize that not only was our garbage disposal not working, but our sink was clogged. Roughly six inches of standing water filled our sink, along with the dirty dishes that would not fit into the dishwasher, and oh my gosh did it smell bad.
As a house, we mobilized pretty quickly. We knew we couldn’t just let it sit all night. After gathering in the small hallway where we could all see one another, we came to the conclusion that we had to wash the dishes somehow. Three of us would go upstairs into the bathtub to wash some, and four  of us would stay downstairs to use the sink, while also figuring out how to clear the kitchen sink of it’s gunk.
I was part of the downstairs crew, doing most of the actual washing before handing the dishes off to be dried, before I swapped into the kitchen to see what was actually happening. Me and Danielle realized that the sink had been suctioned closed by the lid of a jar, and after moving the lid out of the way we assumed the water would go down. Which it did not.
At this point I was frustrated because I knew it was just a wonky circuit, so me and Christine went traversing down to the weird storage closet washing machine area of our land-ladies place, hoping to find a circuit in the dirt room that we could reset. Of course, we did not, and by the time we returned upstairs the sink was nearly empty. In our absence Danielle had been scooping the gross red/orange greasy water into bowls and dumping it elsewhere, hoping we could just get to the bottom of this.
“Do we have baking soda?” I asked, finally using the power of those Buzzfeed Life Hack videos that are always on my Facebook. “Because we could do a natural sink unclogging.”
Good news! We had baking soda!
I took the tongs that Danielle had been using (who was sick of all the gunk that was in our sink) and started digging down into the actual pipe, pulling out a variety of gross food chunks that on any other given day would have disgusted me quite a lot. The water was going down slowly but surely, and I just needed the actual pipe clear enough to pour down some boiling water from the kettle (which was the first step in the Natural Sink Unclogging we Googled later to make sure we were doing it right). All kinds of food remnants were coming up, but I was a woman on a mission, and promptly ignored the inner urge to dry heave.
Finally, clear enough, we poured down the boiling water, and then we dumped half a cup of baking soda into the drain before letting it sit. I washed my hands in a different sink while we waited because they were orange and covered in grease from the sink and I felt all kinds of disgusting after shoving a shot glass down between the flaps of the drain to try and get some extra water out. Then we mixed a concoction of vinegar and hot water before dumping that down the drain too.
Time for: Sink Vomit!
Danielle and I stood over the sink laughing hysterically as all the gunk that was way down in our drain popped back up. I used my trusted tongs to scoop the gunk out of the way (which included a full, bright green, peapod?) so we could wipe it out, but ohhhh my gosh it was gross.
“What now?” I asked as I pushed all the chunks to the side.
Danielle hurried to the computer to read the next step. “After dumping the vinegar down the drain, find a drain cover…” she trailed off.
“What?” I asked. She laughed. “What! Did we do something wrong?”
Turns out we were supposed to use a drain cover to keep the chemical reaction down in the sink, rather than capture all of the gunk.
So. Round two.
We repeated the process after finding a cup that was about the size of the drain that we could shove down in after pouring the vinegar down (which, now that I’m thinking about it, we should’ve just used the jar from earlier). Once we let the reaction settle for a bit, we poured some more boiling water down the drain, and, voila!
Our sink was finally clear and empty.
All of the dishes (except the ones we’d placed in the dishwasher) were clean and put away, and our sink no longer had standing water, and it was time for us to head to bed.
Time check: 12:30 am.
Cool.
I was lucky enough that I didn’t have to leave for a flight at 5am, but I knew others had, so we altogether dismissed everyone and went on our way. Danielle and I stayed up for a bit pretending to pack (she was going home, I was/am staying at a co-worker’s house in the city watching her cat) before we finally went to sleep a little after 1am.
Wednesday was a very long day of work.
Thursday, I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything for Thanksgiving. I’d been kind of bummed that I wasn’t going home/didn’t really have anything to do, but I’d accepted it. Thankfully a couple of weeks before the actual day, a co-worker said she’d heard I was going to be around for Thanksgiving and asked if I could cat-sit.
Perfect! Not only am I becoming known as the office cat-sitter, which is like my entire dream, I would get to spend Thanksgiving with a small furry creature that would let me pet her. I miss animals so much. I happily agreed, and slowly started to form my plan of Thanksgiving around the idea that I would be in the city with a cat.
Honestly, not a bad way to spend the holiday.
I was invited to many things. Carly, whose family was coming to SF instead of her flying home for the holiday, told me I could eat with them. Our spirituality mentor was having a friendsgiving of sorts where people like me, who didn’t have the means to travel home, were gathering to just be around one another. Nico, the JV who’s my counterpart at work, even offered for me to eat with his housemates.
They were all great offers, really, but I ended up doing none of them.
I did, however, go with Nico to a thanks-taking in the city for a few hours. Another co-worker of ours named Nick invited us to his organization’s get together, which was more of the same--people who didn’t really have a place to go but wanted to celebrate. The only reason I was swayed was because Nico didn’t want to go alone, so on Thursday morning I woke up, got dressed, and hopped on BART so we could meet up and head over.
All in all, I was only there for a couple of hours. I upheld my Vegetarian Contact that me and Amanda mentally signed (where we said only for Thanksgiving and Christmas would we cave!) and had a few pieces of turkey, but everything else was all vegetarian. Nick, also a vegetarian, had been tasked to carve the turkey, which was weird. There was a man there who kept trying to get us to sing songs for at least 30 seconds. The walls were decorated with cool art. A small dog refused to interact with anyone but kept winding it’s way around the table.
Nico and I ate, had a couple of beers, thanked Nick for inviting us and getting me out of the house, and then I went home.
We didn’t go around the table and share what we were thankful for, but we didn’t have to. The whole point of Thanksgiving and holidays like it are to be with other people.
Even Carly had texted me: “I also know you like your alone but didn’t want you to be alone today” “Even tho it’s a stupid holiday”
(It is a stupid holiday. The stupidest. But she was right.)
I bought a box of oatmeal cream pies at the Walgreens and then made my way back to the cat, where I binge-watched Netflix and played Animal Crossing on my phone well into the night. Not once did I vocally say, or even write out, what I was thankful for. But..
I’m thankful for the ability do to a year of service. Not everyone has the opportunity. I have learned so much about myself and the work that I want to do once this year is over in just a few months.
I’m thankful for my family, for my brother who FaceTimed me and walked me around to see all of my grandparents and the cats that were there.
I’m thankful for friends who push you to leave the house even though you’ve really resigned yourself to staying in and celebrating that introvert lifestyle.
I’m thankful for Kraft mac and cheese and small cats who curl up on your lap after long days.
I’m thankful for the internet (Net Neutrality forever!) and for all the friendships that I have build over it, the people who have encouraged me and helped me grow into the young adult I am today.
I’m thankful that I will have the chance to go home for Christmas.
But really, I’m especially thankful for a house full of people who will blast Hamilton well into the night, frustrated but still smiling, while we do science experiments on our sink the night before everyone goes their separate ways for the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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