It began on the evening of December 3 when the dishwasher we bought in 1999 stopped working – just after it filled with water. We figured that we got our money’s worth out of it, so went to Longenecker’s Hardware the next day to order a new one. (This is where we usually go for appliances.) I asked the salesman to take us to the dishwasher he would buy if he was getting one for his kitchen. That is how we purchased a new KitchenAid dishwasher.

Then we planned for installation, hoping it could be done before Diane’s birthday party on the 12th and our family Christmas on the 14th. Guess what? They were so busy with installations that they couldn’t do it until the 15th. 🙂 I said, “Oh, well, we will have a lot of guests, so we should have plenty of dishwashers.”

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By the time we woke up on Monday, December 15, Josiah, Becca, and Andre had left for Philadelphia Airport to catch their plane to California. We said goodbye to them the night before.

At 7:30 am, we said goodbye to Mark and Diane before leaving for Penn State Health Lime Spring Outpatient Center, Lancaster, where Cerwin would have Mohs surgery on his right cheek because of Basal Cell Cancer. Mark and Diane were preparing to leave by 8 am.

Cerwin’s was the second surgery of the day for Dr. Elizabeth Billingsley. After meeting Dr. Billingsley, I was sent to the visitor’s room where the person who had the first surgery of the day and her husband were waiting for biopsy results. Before long Cerwin came to the visitor’s room. A few minutes later the wife and daughter of the third patient came to the room. We had lots of fun talking to the other two families.

We connected with the first family, because he worked on and delivered big rigs before his retirement.

Before long we discovered we knew many of the same people the third patient’s family knew. Their children went to Manheim Central (our local public school), and she once picked up whoopie pies from my niece Amy (who lives in our neighborhood). What fun to connect with them. All three patients needed to go for a second surgery because cancer cells were still there. After that Cerwin and the first patient were cleared to go home. The third family was still waiting when we left as well as the husband of the fourth patient.

Cerwin has an incision from just below his eye to his jawbone. He didn’t want me to post any pictures. 🙂 Dr Billingsley did an amazing job. I don’t think Cerwin will have much of a scar – if any.

It was about noon when we got into our car and my cell phone rang. It was the man who was installing our new dishwasher. I told him how to get in the house and kitchen as he was ten minutes away and we were half an hour away.

He had the old dishwasher out and was beginning to install the new one when we got home.

I love it! They improved a lot of things in twenty-six years. I can set it, so the door opens when it has dried the dishes to a certain point. That saves electricity and allows the dishes to “air dry”.

The next day (Tuesday) when I was doing laundry from the weekend: tablecloths, tea towels, towels, and washcloths, plus sheets from two guest rooms, the dryer stopped working! That was in the late afternoon after the Longenecker’s repairmen had gone home.

Most of the bedding had dried in the first two loads, so I turned the heat up in the garage and hung towels and washcloths on tables and chairs. There was dark wash in the washer. I did the same thing with that load and also hung some things on hangers.

The next morning, I sent an email repair report to Longenecker’s and received a call in less than a minute. They thought it sounded like a belt – an easy repair – and sent a repairman in a few hours. It was so nice to have a working dryer again.

As he pulled out of the driveway, All Season Tree and Bucket Service pulled in. Amos was responding to a call Cerwin placed several weeks ago because a large limb was hanging in one of our tall trees. Cerwin was uncomfortable about that because it was above the electric and phone lines that came to our house from the pole along the road.

The limb withstood some recent windy days, but when there were very high winds a day or two later, we were relieved that it was no longer in the tree.

It is nice to have working equipment again and our house back to a sense of normalcy.