The Joys of Homeownership: I Love Trash

It doesn't take much to make me happy. I find joy in the simplest things. Conversely, the most inane things can potentially ruin my otherwise satisfactory world. Inane things like this:

This foul creation was ruining my world.

I don't like to use the word "hate" very often, unless I really mean it. I HATE our garbage can. You might ask, "How can that be?" After all, it's one of those tall, fancy-pants, shiny, step-on-the-pedal-and-it-opens gadgets. It's in the top 1% of trash receptacles. I don't care. It's awful to look at, gets filthy, and I find it terribly ironic and disgusting to regularly CLEAN a garbage can. It holds so much trash that it stinks. And that great flip-top feature? It causes THIS:

Why I'm chippy.

The one handy thing I CAN do, and do well, is paint. I painted one summer in college. So I gots the skillz, yo. One of my first projects was repainting our kitchen. And that wretched can and its obnoxious flippy lid ruined my beautiful paint job. Compounding my frustration with the current garbage can, at Thanksgiving my idiot well-meaning brother-in-law broke the one feature that made it somewhat tolerable: The flippy pedal. Now this stink-infested eyesore doesn't even function properly. Oh, how I hate you, garbage can.

I was miserable. Until this beauty came along:

Hello, gorgeous

My Director recognized my misery and ordered this wonder of engineering and home organization for me. (Don't ask me from where or the brand. I'm not privy to these details.) Of course, once it arrived it sat unopened in the box in our garage for a couple of weeks. Until the Saturday before Christmas, when My Director took Peanut out for a couple of hours. I knew in the back of her mind she wanted me to install the lovely new garbage can under the sink. (I knew because she suggested I use my alone time to complete this task.) Despite my desire to rid our lives of the broken smelly eyesore, I fought her. I told her I had a lot of other things to accomplish in those two hours. (I actually did.) If I'm being honest, I was afraid to do it by myself. (Read: Not handy.) I got over myself and did it anyway:

TA-DAAAA! (Cue the harp and choir of angels singing.)

This victory proves I do in fact have an inner handyman, with limited abilities. But it did not come without incident. Turns out, beautiful, hidden, under-the-sink, love-of-my-life trash can didn't come with screws. (At least, I thought it didn't.) As a result, I had to a) locate the drawer in the organizer thingy in the garage that holds all of the screws and other small thingamabobs, b) locate the proper screws c) locate FOUR of them and d) proceed with otherwise simple installation. In other words, when faced with an obstacle, like most good television news producers, I improvised.

I'm GREAT at organizing, but have NO idea what
most of this stuff is used for.

But wait... here's where the "did it by myself" part backfired. You see, the problem with my improvisation is that it was unnecessary. Had My Director been there, she would have read the instructions. Had she read the instructions, she would have found the proper screws ATTACHED to those instructions.

Oops.

Of course, I found the screws after I had completed installation, when I was throwing away the box. This is why I'm not handy. I have no patience. I don't like being told what to do and how to do it. (aka reading instructions.) I am calling this a victory anyway. Peanut agrees. Upon returning home to find my installed surprise, she christened the new trash can:

Yes, that chocolate milk box should have been recycled.
We made an exception for this momentous occasion.

What, you may ask, ever happened to the destroyed paint job from the flopping lid on the old can? My Director inadvertently fixed it with her big gift to me this Christmas:

Isn't she lovely?
Has dual-zone for red and white.

For more proof of how the roles are reversed in our house, and how we're ok with that, click HERE.