Beth's beef is that I forgot to water her plants and the yard. Again. This has been going on for awhile now, her asking me to water and me forgetting. She'll ask me the night before or call me from work during the day and it just keeps slipping my mind. This time around I brought it on myself when I volunteered Sunday to do the watering every day…and didn't. So now the yard and plants are turning brown, she's hugely pissed at me and I feel like an asshole. I've put a note up on my computer to remind me that says, simply enough, "Water." I think that'll do it, but if it doesn't this place is going to start looking like an Arizona retirement village, with a lovely little low-maintenance rock garden for a yard and plastic rosebushes in the back. And I'll probably kill those, too…

My beef is primarily with the kitchen sink, but it extends to the contractor who worked on our house following the '94 earthquake. The sink has been leaking for awhile now and we finally brought a plumber in to fix the leaking drainpipe. A week later I noticed that the sink was still leaking, this time from the hose leading to the faucet. Today we had another plumber come in to take a look at that and he diagnosed the problem as the fixtures leading to the faucet's water supply, which is something I can fix. I headed up to Orchard, bought the parts, came home and installed them…and now the damned thing's not working at all.

The problem is in the faucet, the high-tech, top-of-the-line, all the bells and whistles, way expensive faucet the contractor fucked up when he installed it. How do I know he fucked it up? I watched him do it. When he first hooked it up it had very little water pressure, so he opened it up, whipped out a pocket knife and proceeded to cut out the little filtering screens in the head and hose. Then he wrapped the threads of the head with something that looked like -- and probably was -- one of the plastic twines you find on your morning newspaper (no, it wasn't the teflon tape it should have been) and put it back together. And it worked. Sort of. It's always bothered me that he did that, but we were so eager to be back in the house after being gone four months for a one month job that I let it slide. Now I wish I hadn't. Now we have to replace the faucet and this time it's on our dime; we can't send the bill to the insurance company.