blonde and proud

After not writing a new "real" post in almost a month, I had several ideas for this week's Tuesday blog post. But they were all about ISSUES, and I'm sure that you (like me) are sick of hearing about ISSUES. So I will tell you a story instead.

A couple of times a year, I round up various tchotchkes and run them through the dishwasher--the green glass bottles I use as bookends, a cup and saucer from my grandmother's dishes, a decorative plate my mother-in-law brought us from France, etc. They get cleaned up shiny and new without me having to dust. Because HOUSEWORK. 

So this afternoon I decided to do that and breezed around the house gathering stuff. Loaded it all in the dishwasher and fired it up. A couple of hours later, I came back to unload and saw this when I opened the door: 

ewwwww! what is that???

I had no idea why a sticky, semi-solid brown substance was coating the floor of the dishwasher. It was nasty, though.

Then I started pulling things out of the dishwasher and they were all coated with this weird, gummy substance. I was starting to get seriously grossed out because it was icky and it was all over everything.  

Had there been some weird food thing still stuck to one of the dishes?? had the coating melted off the brown utensil holder I almost never wash?? what in the world would do this??

Then I found this:

Seriously, HOW DID ONE OF THE DOGS CRAP IN THE DISHWASHER? I was so grossed out I could hardly bring myself to touch it.

Except then I noticed IT HAD A LABEL. A Crate and Barrel label. And it was suspiciously solid. And then it dawned on me that I had PUT A CANDLE in the dishwasher. 

A brown candle. A candle shaped like a pine cone that had dust in between the pine cone bits, because how in the world was I going to get it clean? why, put it in the dishwasher, of course. LIGHT BULB! I even remembered to put it on the top shelf! Because if I put it in the bottom rack, it would MELT!

Seriously, y'all. Dumbest blonde moment ever. I pulled out the, um, turd-like object and ran the dishwasher again just to see if the mess would disappear so I could pretend this never happened. The wax does seem to have melted off all the dishes, but that waxy brown coating on the floor of the machine? Apparently that's going to have to be scrubbed off by hand.

Oh, yeah. A frickin' genius, that's me.