I am no longer the dishwasher!

Finally our little, wonderful, dishwasher is all hooked up!

After an interesting but productive trip to Home's, we finally have the right faucet adaptor and that little machine started chugging away last night to clean my huge pile of dirties from the previous 24 hours. You see, I had taken off a large part of the faucet to take it with me to the store day before yesterday and hadn't made it there, nor had I put it back together, so the dishes piled while I counted on a successful shopping trip.

Yesterday afternoon I drove to Home's, parked in the roof top parking and rode the elevator to the first floor. Once there, I wandered around briefly, looking for someone who didn't seem super busy so I could ask them where to go to hempin (return) my last attempt at purchasing the right plumbing. When I finally someone, I looked at her, and as intelligently as I could sound while only using one word to say what I needed, said 'hempin?', which probably sounded totally retarded, since in Japanese, there is no sound assocciated with asking a question. At one point I had looked it up in my now missing Japanese phrasebook, but have since forgotten any of the phrase other than just the one word, 'hempin'.

She pointed me in the right direction where I again tried out my bad pronounciation, and again got great results. Thank God the Japanese are forgiving people!

With my item returned and my faucet pieces in a bag in my hand I confidently walked toward the giant aluminum foil covered faucet hanging from the ceiling. When I arrived in the plumbing area, I pulled my faucet out of the bag and began my task, which was quickly completed, now that I could make comparisons.

My confidence boosted, I began to search for the elusive furniture coasters needed for the placement of any furniture atop any tatami mats. I found many devices for keeping chairs and such from scratching hardwood floors, but nothing that really struck me as what I would need for the tatami.

Since I had come to Home's braced for a game of charades to fix my faucet, and hadn't needed it, since the plumbing went so well, I decided that I would use my charades to ask for furniture coasters.

I found the nearest associate and waited for him to finish helping his current customer and then when I saw that he was done I stepped up and said 'sumemasen' or something similar, to which he replied in a like fashion but with more that I didn't understand. I then thought back to every game of charades I've ever played as I tried to figure out how to act out 'furniture coaster'. DD sat in the shopping cart looking at me like I was nuts as I repeatedly pretended to sit down until the man said chair, followed by my saying tatami a useless number of times, trying to gesture tatami with a chair on top and then say coaster, while I tried to act out sliding something between the floor and my shopping cart wheel. Finally after much bouncing about and foolishness, the fantastically patient and good natured fellow said 'AHH!' and led me to the things to keep your chairs from scratching hardwood floors. On the way there, a passerby who'd seen my charades decided he also wanted to join in the game and we all proceeded to play as I again tried to make motions show that I wanted something bigger and flat.

Eventually paper and pen were added to the equation, pictures were drawn and I was led off in another direction. 'At last' I thought, expecting to be taken to what it was I was searching for. Unfortunatly I was led to something I had never seen before, nor thought to want, though it was pretty interesting. I'll not attempt to describe it, but suffice it to say, it was not a coaster. I nodded a bunch and decided to look interested in what I was shown so that the nice gentleman wouldn't feel that all his time was wasted. Luckily, he had other things to do and quickly headed back to them and I was able to escape without guilt for not buying it.

I am still without furniture coasters, my DIY plumbing showered the kitchen with hot water, and if my computer and dishwasher run at the same time, it flips the breaker, but all in all, yesterday was a success!