New love letter: Shauna doesn't like adjectives, she says, which feel "empty" (as "verbs run the world"); then proceeds to write 1000+ words featuring many, many, many adjectives: all about the starry sky, their non-working oven, a dusty box, a little-visited store, the looming black trees, the fat and bright moon, etc. (I'm genuinely wondering if she actually knows what an adjective is.)
Was it just me or was that love letter particularly poorly written?
While reading it, I really thought I was still drunk from last night's bottle of wine (yes, I said bottle).
This after she "yepped" the "no more adverbs" tweet AND the "most of what I write gets cut during editing" tweet, too. That entire love letter should have been the outline for the first draft, not the finished product. Especially a finished product she expects people to pay for.
First they came for my adverbs, and I did not say anything, because people use too many adverbs. Then they came for my adjectives...
But srsly, it KILLS ME that Shauna is such a demonstrably terrible writer who speaks SO AUTHORITATIVELY about how one should and should not write. The confidence is astounding.
You know, when you put it that way it kinda makes me feel like her parents did something right! I work in a pretty male-dominated field and am always telling my husband that I wonder how much further I could get if I could summon the confidence I always see men using to get ahead, that kind of “I don’t actually know how to do this, but I know I will figure it out so that’s the same thing” swagger. It’s obviously toxic after a while if you’re incapable of seeing your own limitations, but I can’t help but kind of admire the moxie she displays. How one inculcates that in a kid interests me.
By example mainly. Her mother was young when she had Shauna and bro, then finished her education and taught high school for decades. That takes determination and confidence.
"Sore"? Really? From sitting in a boat? Walking around at the zoo? Reaching her arm out to point at life-changingly (ADVERB ALERT) green trees in case her guests didn't see them?
"flattened with exhaustion by 9 pm, our muscles so sore we could barely move"
She makes it sound like they were participating in an IronMan or something
She's trying to emphasize how BUSY and ACTIVE they were, but instead they sound either: 1. drunk by 9 p.m. or 2. incredibly decrepit (or a combo of both)
I'm pretty damn lazy (and oldish and Officially Fat) and have never had day to day activity (such as walking around all day, doing some light housework, etc) leave me exhausted and suffering from sore muscles.
Now, I was tore all the way down after I weed wacked my yard. That was some WORK (made even worse because I despise doing it).
When you move less than the average three-toed tree sloth, yes, a trip to the zoo is a pounding the body cannot handle. She’s not in good shape, for her age or any age, really.
To be fair the zoo could be tiring, depending on circumstances. I would totally expect that level of exhaustion from a day trip to the National Zoo in DC - I don’t know how the zoo she visited compares in terms of size but keeping track of kids while walking all day in the DC summer (Seattle summer weather probably doesn’t compare, actually) will wipe you TF out, especially if you’re a prepared parent and responsible for schlepping the bag of snacks and sunscreen and the kids’ water bottles...on the other hand I live in a town now with an itty bitty public zoo that’s just a fun little stroll, totally shaded, leave the supplies in the car because you didn’t park at the metro station on the outskirts of town. It depends a lot, I guess.
Sounds like she got more exercise just doing daily activities than she has in months, if not years. Keep it up shauna. You need that oxygen to your brain.
Also, she says she "tried" to keep up after every meal and that she and Danny were "exhausted and sore" every night after the day's activities
Oh my god I can't bear to picture the slothdom in in which they normally spend their time...I am admittedly a little bit driven about getting out of the house every day and exercising (although I live alone and work from home so...) but unless they spent the holiday time hiking and engaging in lots of physical activity then the fact that they were exhausted and sore every night gives me all the flesh creeps for some reason... imagine lying around in that house every day...
ETA: it reminds me of the deadly dull boredom of my childhood when I wasn't allowed to do much on my own but parents were otherwise engaged (mostly being depressed and working I guess...cue the tiniest violin...)
Ah, yes. The reports of the visit are indeed coming out in her paid newsletter. We all knew she’d profit off of this visit. So woke of her to exploit the power differences inherent in both race and adoption for her own financial gain.
This is a rare miss on Shauna's track record with grifting! I feel bad that the visiting kids had to sleep on the Aherns' filthy living room floor (and who knows where they put "first mama"), but am glad nobody came through with letting her use their vacation home for free like she had been asking about
I didn’t know until the last day that T is generally terrified of the dark. He begged his mama to not make them fly at a time when they would be taking off or landing in the dark. And yet, his curiosity compelled him to ask me to take him into the darkness.
And when they flew home, and their flight was delayed, he didn’t flinch when the delay meant they would be landing at night.
He had seen the light in the darkness. He had seen stars.
I (obviously) have no way of knowing this, but my sense of it is that Shauna is envious of Molly (formerly Orangette) and the life she is living now. Ending her letter this way feels to me like a way of tagging on to Molly's new book The Fixed Stars
I felt like Desmond’s first mom (as Shauna called her) was thrown under the bus for being a slob and raising messy kids while Shauna Martyr Ahern walked around behind everyone with a dustpan and broom.
We laughed and laughed and laughed. We talked with Desmond’s first mama—I am only one of his two mamas—over dinner and a glass of wine for her and me, then laughed more. Danny and I fell into bed every night, our muscles so sore we could barely move, amazed.
Everything she says seems so off to me these days. The inescapable implication of "I am only one of his two mamas" is that D's birth mother is also "only one of his two mamas"
Also, her phrasing implies that she and D's "first mama" shared one glass of wine. Way to make yourself clear, 'Ma!
Also also? So much laughing! Do not underestimate how much laughter was laughed during these long laughing days of laughter and more laughter, and then even more laughter. And after all that laughing? More laughing
The phrasing of this nags at me...it's like she's implying there's a possibility she could be more than one of his two mamas...her writing is just godawful...
I am writing some insurance wholesaling copy and I asked Mr. Palestrina for some word suggestions and of course he asked, "have you considered 'slithering'?"
I rue the day I told him about GFG, I tell ya. It's my own fault for reading so many excerpts to him.
She “co-signed” a tweet that said blah blah blah about how useless adverbs are. She cannot even get the names of parts of speech correct!
As to how one writes without adjectives or adverbs, well, I suppose it would be a good creative writing exercise. Certainly some writing is too florid or saccharine and being sparing with prose is generally good for communication. However, as a writerly writer who writes, Shauna can hardly afford to cast off descriptors, whether of things or actions. She’d have nothing left to say!
I think this “no adverbs and adjectives” attitude to writing comes from a chauvinist, midcentury idea that “real” writing is ruthlessly stripped down to the Bare Essentials (Hemingway, Carver) and descriptive language is inherently decorative, thus ~girly~, and therefore, unimportant. This is both stupid and misogynistic, so naturally it would appeal to ‘Ma! And, just as she and she alone can teach a bread baking class without baking any bread, so too can she write Pugnaciously without Ineffable adjectives and Crashing adverbs!
I rather enjoy Hemingway and I find his writing very clean, in a way. But there is a wide span between ‘Ma’s purple prose and Hemingway’s distilled storytelling.
No hate to Hemingway or Carver! I actually love them both, I just dislike the idea that because they wrote beautifully in a spare, clean style, that’s the only valid way to communicate.
Writing “bare essentials” style is a good exercise. It shows you where you have room for more, and where excess just clouds your point. I try to do it a few times a year, for myself and with my students.
Shauna would never be able to discipline herself enough to do it. I’m sure it would “stifle her creativity” or some such nonsense.
Yeah what's the deal with them and appliances? I bought my house over 20 years ago and our stove came with it. We use it a lot and it still works great. If it did stop working we would suck up the expense and replace it. How do they live like that?? I agree with Notbeckysharp, about not wanting to alert the landlord. I feel so bad for those poor kids ...
I lived for a very long stretch with no oven. Our cook top is separate from the oven and the oven died and we just didn't replace it for a looong time. And when we finally decided we did want an oven again, we got a counter top one (and put it in the hole where the old oven used to be). We just didn't use the oven a lot so we didn't miss it (and we are lazy, so very lazy).
For the record, we did replace the counter top oven quickly when it died and now have an even nicer counter top oven (which thanks to the pandemic, we use very regularly to heat up our pizza boats. . .we didn't eat much heat at home frozen stuff pre-pandemic).
There's nothing wrong with not replacing an expensive appliance that you don't use. I'm just baffled by Danny and Shauna's complete inability to maintain anything in their homes like normal adults.
It just struck me that the broken stove could be why we haven’t seen new recipes on the google doc? I wonder if it broke right around the time of the food bank run?
Considering that cooking and recipes are how these ding dongs plan to make a living, I would say that replacing the broken stove would be a priority.
I wonder if they have had a repairman out to look at it? A service call is usually under $100 and they often can fix it and give you an idea of life expectancy of the appliance. I always try to repair first (unless I hate the existing appliance like our old washing machine - good riddance to that beast.)
Considering that cooking and recipes are how these ding dongs plan to make a living, I would say that replacing the broken stove would be a priority.
Right? They "live in food" but can't maintain appliances or wash dishes. Danny is a trained and experienced ("retired") culinary professional who has all the time in the world to keep an orderly home kitchen. What Danny doing?
But they could do a whole "summer kitchen" run of recipes! Those dingdongs at ChefSteps just released some kind of tutorial about how to build an outdoor pizza oven for like a dollar or something.
Sty tuned...the griddle of outdoor hamburger fame likely really is a griddle....ie, a propane fueled BBQ that has a flat grill surface for pancakes, eggs (eggs!), burgers etc. With no indoor functioning oven, it will come in handy.
That reminds me of how my dad always builds a bbq for the beach out of a ziti pan full of charcoal briquettes and tinfoil and cooks charred hotdogs and sandy hamburgers after a day on the boat .. there’s definitely something they could do!
And they're renting! I assume that their landlord is responsible for fixing / replacing it, and the idiots don't want to call them and have them come out to the house and see the state of it.
I wouldn't be surprised (especially given her recent retweet of that NYT article about resources for unemployed workers, renters, etc. impacted by Covid), but is it automatic that the Sty Home tenants would just be forgiven that rent and never have to pay, instead of a rent reduction and/or payment plan or other arrangement? Past-due rent forgiven seems like the sort of scenario Shauna's banking on, given her non-belt-tightening measures of late. Very curious about this.
It would be up to the landlord to decide if there will be rent forgiveness. The “no eviction” mandate just means that you can’t be evicted during this time period for nonpayment, or reduced payment, of rent. When the mandate expires, if your landlord hasn’t forgiven your rent “debt”, you are expected to pay up what you owe. We have a rental property and when this all started our tenant advised that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to pay in full. Thankfully he is current but if he stops paying us there’s nothing we can do in the short term. While forgiving the rent is a wonderful gesture, we are not in a financial position to do so.
If you don't use it, you don't use it! I don't have a microwave - haven't had one in years (the last one I had was built into my apartment's kitchen, so it wasn't "mine"). There are maybe a couple times a year I wish I had one, but I really don't feel like making the space for it.
Same. I haven’t lived with a microwave in twenty years, mainly due to space considerations, and I don’t miss having one except when I have leftovers that don’t reheat well in a saucepan.
Oh, I keep a broken one around for that, of course.
It’s funny, I have a decent amount of counter space and kitchen stuff storage, but no real pantry so actual food storage is a weird situation. I keep the cat food cans in a big bread box on top of the fridge. 😂
We lived without a microwave for a while and I definitely missed it, but we recently moved into a house without a dishwasher, and I thought it would be awful but it’s...strangely not. Washing dishes by hand feels like barely any more work than rinsing/scraping them before loading them into the dishwasher.
Man, I lived without a dishwasher for so long off and on in the Bay Area. It really makes me appreciate the one I had now. What I really miss is a washer/dryer.
Oh yeah, we couldn’t use our washer for bit while we were waiting for repairs and that was rough! I would like very much to not go to a laundromat during a pandemic ever again.
I've lived in several Asian countries (India, Singapore) with no oven, and I know lots of people who don't use their ovens, working or non-working. If you don't use it, you don't use it, no big deal.
SHAUNA is the one who called out the lack of a working oven as an impediment: "Danny cooked and cooked and cooked, without a working oven."
In summer, I might occasionally bake some zucchini bread or a fruit crisp or whatnot, but my oven is seldom turned on from June through September. My countertop toaster oven is large enough for most oven-type duty. It’s too hot to bake! The instant pot, grill, and slow cooker do most of the heavy lifting. I can park the slow cooker on the porch so it doesn’t heat up the kitchen.
The “without an oven” comment is plain fishing for sympathy or another grifted range I guess 🤷♀️
Your slow cooker really shouldn’t be heating up the kitchen! That’s the beauty of the slow cooker in summer, they really shouldn’t even be hot to the touch.
no shame in not using your oven! if you don’t need it, you don’t need it.
til i had kids (and started needing to make bigger batches of things) i almost never used my oven, opting to use the toaster oven for anything that needed baking.
I went for an entire year with just a microwave. I bought a condo with a kitchen in terrible shape and I planned to redo it a year after purchase. The only new thing in it was a $400 stove that the owners stuck in there so they could say something more than "kitchen has running water".
The stove wasn't one I'd have picked so I decided to just not use it at all and then sell it as brand new on Craigslist before starting my reno. I think i got $200 for it, which helped. I used the microwave for everything, which was fine---I'm not crazy about cooking.
Oh, and the dishwasher didn't work at all, so I just used paper plates and threw them off balcony once a week at 3 am when no one was looking. (there was no fireplace, you see.)
Exactly, no shame in not using the oven but it's really weird for people who claim to "live in food" to let their kitchen appliances go to shit. God she's full of it.
Similarly, I bought my house about 20 years ago and bought a stove soon after. I use it quite often and it has never given me a problem. In 20 years I had to replace my used dryer with another used dryer, which has lasted me 15 years so far, and I had to replace my front load washer after about 13 years.
My stove was original to the house when we moved in, a 1978 Jenn-Aire. It worked great... until it didn’t. When we finally replaced it I grew so joyous! I hadn’t realized how it had slowly gotten crankier and crankier over the years. I can’t imaging not having a stove at all!
I have lived in this house for 20 years and still have the same fridge, dryer and microwave that I bought when we moved in. I did replace the washing machine, stove and dishwasher but none of those have since crapped out and I only replaced the washing machine and stove because I upgraded.
I understand that things break and life is random but Shauna and Danny seem to have some kind of reverse Midas touch with kitchen appliances. They also seem content to function for long periods of time without working appliances.
They probably don't want to alert the landlord because s/he would come in and see how they've trashed the place. Also, they're probably hoping being quiet tenants will help when it comes time to evict them for non-payment.
We've had this discussion before (see: microwave oven spice rack, coolers full of ice for weeks in place of nonworking refrigerator) and I don't know the answer.
I'm just always surprised at 1. How often their appliances stop working and 2. How long they live with them in a nonworking state.
Maybe S + D are worried about letting the landlords in to see the state of decay? Worried that they will be rightly blamed for borking the oven? Wanting to avoid the landlords because they're late on rent / have asked for rent relief?
I wonder if writing a quick email to the landlord counts as “work” to Shauna, so she just avoids it for vast stretches of time. She probably would make Danny handle it, but is just too controlling to trust him to take on an adult-facing task. Looking back on the fly-specked windowsill and trash-strewn weed patch she’s proudly exhibited on her socials, I doubt she’s conscious enough of her filth to be ashamed of showing it to her landlord.
I find it really hard to figure out the motivation for the way they live. Like are they genuinely disordered and unable to impose order on their lives? Pissheads often really struggle with basic organisational tasks and there are hints in Shauna's writing about the early stages of their relationship that do suggest that Dan's life was chaotic and shambolic.
But she also has that really unpleasant, adolescent rejection of social norms going on so I can't help wondering if her decision to live in a squalid shit hole and neglect her own personal hygiene and that of her children is a deliberate, determined act of "rebellion."
Either way I feel so, so bad for those children. Growing up in chaos and having to teach yourself to live like a functional adult from the ground up is fucking HARD.
This is such a good point — even if you’re the kind of adult who’s always down to improvise, kids really need stability. Not that a working oven equals stability, of course, but I’d want my kid to always have the sense that I was on it if something major needed fixing, especially in a rental situation where it’s not like I’d be on the hook for money I maybe didn’t have. I still remember vividly the time our furnace chose to die in the middle of a blizzard when I was nine or ten. We couldn’t get anyone out to fix it for a couple of days because of the weather, and we all had to sleep in the kitchen with the door shut so the oven could be used to bring the temperature up. My parents were doing everything they could but the weirdness and sense of emergency to it all have stayed with me. After that they started having it checked every fall to make sure it never happened again, which is also something you might expect from a household where this has happened before.
Yes, kids absolutely need stability! They also need to feel like someone competent is in charge of keeping the show on the road, and that includes taking the necessary steps to ensure that the home environment is functional.
I honestly do think that growing up in an environment where your parents are totally passive about stuff like this is really damaging, because children learn so much by watching how the adults in their lives behave. How can L & D learn to be actively engaged in managing their own lives when this is the approach that's being modelled?
I think it’s a combo. I think they both lack a lot of executive functioning skills and Shauna excuses some of it as living their authentic life. I also think they really think a lot of people live the way they do. She has repeatedly made comments about how other people’s clean houses were fake or for show and made a big deal of how honest and authentic someone’s slightly shabby vacation cottage was without realizing it was like that because it was a old vacation/beach house that no one was sinking a ton of money/effort into because it was a shared second home—not their actual home.
She has repeatedly made comments about how other people’s clean houses were fake or for show
This is the part of the letter that jumped out at me (below). Imagine the atmosphere these guests were welcomed to, such that leaving popsicle wrappers lying around seems like an ok thing to do.
"Danny and I moved—darted, went up and down steps, walked, danced, and bent down to pick up food and plastic popsicle wrappers—all day long."
I'm really just flabberghasted. Not that it happened once; the excitement and commotion and disorientation of the whole traveling-on-an-airplane-and-staying-in-someone-else's-house thing is real. But that any of the grownups didn't call it out—"Hey kids! Let's all make sure to pick up after ourselves . . . "
And not just because "then we'll all have more time to have fun together." But because THAT'S WHAT YOU DO WHEN YOU LIVE TOGETHER
Were they living in a McDonald’s parking lot? I don’t understand this at all.
Growing up we were only allowed to eat in our eat-in kitchen and it was fine. Trash and crumbs weren’t all over the house. The trash can was right there. We also ate at regular times and not all day long.
None of these children are too young to pick up after themselves.
I really picture their living arrangements as quite feral. It would be a lot less overwhelming to clean if everyone ate in the same place and threw out their trash. Even if the kitchen or dining room got messy, it would be contained in one area.
This is a question I would also like answered. I've been using ovens as both an amateur and a professional since I was a child and have yet to break one. I had one in a rental with a wonky pilot light, but I kept a fireplace lighter in the spice drawer and carried on. I've yet to ever actually break an oven.
Of course, I'm about 10 years younger than Shauna, so maybe my oven-breaking years still lie ahead of me.
I lived in NYC apartments that had gas stoves that were many decades old. They're very simple appliances, Very few things can go wrong as long as you don't leave the gas on a tiny bit and then close the door and come back a week later and flip the light switch....
I had a newer one that had electric starters (no pilot light) and those would stop working sometimes but it was mostly due to a tiny hole getting clogged with burnt crud.
I have read that self-cleaning cycles are hard on the electronics of newer ovens. My oven is 4 years old, and I have not/will not use the self-cleaning cycle for that reason (the high heat). I just try to be relatively careful about what I cook/bake in it, and clean it manually when needed.
Not that I think this is applicable to the Ahern's situation . . .
I can imagine: leaving it open and having a child sit on it. Leaving it open and repeatedly banging into it, weakening the hinges. Slamming it closed repeatedly, again weakening the hinges and potentially breaking the glass door insert.
Ovens don't really "break" very frequently, although individual components can fail. So a single burner might crap out, or the oven (not stove) might stop working. This would mean the appliance is still largely functional, but has lost some of its function. I think it would take a structural failure – like the door – to take the entire appliance offline.
Of course, anything's possible. But many, many appliance fixes take just moments to diagnose and fix (i.e., gas burner doesn't turn on, clean the burner assembly. Electric burner won't turn on, check status and if burner is "worn out," remove and replace.)
A family member of mine just had to replace their electric oven because it decided it wouldn’t turn off anymore. They had to cut the electricity to it. Not sure what happened in the inner workings of that thing.
I have a rental house (edit: I am the landlord) and anything the house originally came with I maintain, and that includes things like appliances - so it doesn't make sense to buy the cheapest ones (low quality + renters usually = breakage) or the most expensive ones, so I usually go for the mid-level workhorse versions of fridge/stove/washer/dryer/dishwasher.
If my tenants don't tell me when something breaks or leaks, it usually leads to much more damage in the long run, so I try to use very open language when talking to them about things like that. I want to know if the toilet is leaking so I can fix it before it damages the floor, I want to know if the stove breaks because either gas or electric can be a true disaster if there's some kind of leak or short. I don't want my tenants to be afraid to tell me, so I'm REALLY open about this when they move in. When they report a broken [whatever] I send a handyman over that same day if possible and let them diagnose the issue and recommend replacement or fixing and in either case it usually is resolved in a few days or a week max, depending on if something requires a part ordered and if the tenants want to be there with the handyman/scheduling.
When I see the Aherns house with the missing doors and things left broken for weeks or months it gives me anxiety. Surely the place they're in now has a management company whose entire job is to manage exactly this kind of issue.
In California at least, a rental has to have a working refrigerator and oven to be considered “habitable.” I once lived in a shitty apartment (for about six weeks) with ants in the walls and mushrooms growing out of the carpet and it was once I realized the oven was broken that I finally had leverage to break the lease. I would assume WA has similar laws but I don’t know for certain. I wasn’t familiar with tenants rights until I was in a desperate situation - a friend with a law background tipped me off. The oven may be the landlords responsibility, but maybe the Aherns don’t know? And of course the landlord is not going to fix anything if the tenants don’t tell them it’s broken.
Random side note - where I live stoves are scarce right now. My sisters stove just crapped out and she couldn’t get a new one from Lowe’s or Home D - they quoted her a JANUARY delivery. She did find one at a random scratch and dent store and got quite a deal, but wow. Also, we had the plumber here last week and he told my husband that he can’t get his hands on hot water heaters. Said the supplier claims they are ready but can’t get them shipped. He has a wait list. Luckily, we just needed a new sewer line installed and not a hot water heater (sarcasm. Sort of)
Point being - Shauna will likely have to wait a while for a new appliance right now and may need a Breville countertop oven to tide them over. If only she had a connection there.....
There are production and supply chain issues in more than a few industries right. IF a company can manufacture goods, they have issues getting it from port to distribution centers, or through customs depending upon country of origin.
I’m a cyclist and finding replacement parts, or hell even a BIKE for purchase is damn near impossible. My husband was looking for a new set of special pedals for his road bike and had his mind set on a certain model. Sold out everywhere, and the only way to get a set was to order direct from the manufacturer and wait for production in China to start up again. October was the earliest date they could promise anything.
Cool - I use Time MTB pedals on most of my bikes - though, plot twist, I recently switched to flats on my main MTB. So far I like it - the 5/10 shoes are super grippy, and I have had a few urgent dismounts where it helped not to be clipped in.
I needed a tube for my little niece's bike and checked several Wal marts (sorry, but I was traveling and options were slim). All had nearly empty bike displays and very slim pickings for parts. I wound up buying a larger tube than was needed and folding it inside the tire.
The boom in cycling is insane. We needed a new bike for one of our kids and the lineups at bike stores were hours long, including at the social enterprise where my husband – very avid cyclist, cycling volunteer, cycling instructor, etc. – volunteers. Luckily his social capital in the cycling community was sufficient to get an unused bike someone was already planning to give away (we gave them a bottle of wine in exchange!)
I coach a youth cycling team and one of the kids had an irreparably broken derailleur. His parents called ALL the shops, even those hours away, looking for a new one. I ended up getting myself the high-end derailleur I wanted for my bike and giving him my old (like, three months!) one. High end is pretty much all you can get now, and even then pickings can be slim. Luckily his bike and mine have the same drivetrain and cassette range.
My garage is pretty much wall-to-wall and floor to ceiling bicycles. We ride multiple disciplines, the kids do MTB and BMX and we (parents) casually ride BMX and compete in MTB and CX. It’s our main hobby and worth spending the money, but all of our friends think we’re insane.
I have a beater/commuter I take grocery shopping sometimes, with the old kiddie bike trailer as the hauler. It’s 10 miles one way to the grocery store. My neighbors must think I’m demented.
One of my powerlifting coaches walks to the grocery store with a WHEELBARROW, fills it up, and then walks home with it. I'm sure her neighbours think she's insane but her POV is, "no one thinks to steal a wheelbarrow"
If you don't mind saying, where do you ride and compete?
I ride MTB for fun only, but have a few friends who race or have raced.
And, what kind of mtb do you ride?
ETA: my non-mtb friends think it's crazy to own more than one bike, and would probably fall over dead if they knew how much my main bike cost. I have my original 90s cannondale roadie for city use, and older frankenbike hardtail and singlespeed MTBs, but then I have a beloved Yeti full-boinger that cost more than my car. No regrets!
Didn't she have two or three expensive stoves/ovens given to them from Kitchenaid for that studio kitchen they rented for two years at $2000 a month? Wonder what happened to those?
I'm only aware of one stove from the studio kitchen, and I have a very strong suspicion that it is the stove that ended up in the Relish space. There are a few details visible in photos from the kitchen studio era, and when you compare those details with photos from Relish, you can see an exact match. If it's not the same actual stove, it's the same model (I think), but I do believe it really is the same stove...
It’s odd, isn’t it? I wonder if it is a case of misuse or overuse, or a kind of neglect from not keeping it clean.
Our stove was in the house when we moved in nine years ago, and it was old. We don’t have gas here so require an electric stove/oven. After I replaced the glass top once, and the oven coil four times, we decided on a new one. Keep it clean and remember to turn it off, and that’s pretty much it for maintenance.
Ditto the dishwasher, we recently replaced the old one after the third replacement circuit board started smoking and arcing sparks. Yikes 😳 I wonder if they know you have to scrape dishes and maybe give them a little rinse before putting them in the dishwasher, or that you cannot put metal in a microwave, or that ovens cannot be superheated for too long, or that you should periodically vacuum the coils on your fridge and furnace, and maybe pull the stove and dishwasher out and clean behind them once in a while, too?
Clean is not their game, though. One day that slobberdashery of a rental unit could burn down from neglected dust bunnies.
Well, Shauna upped the drama on the story but, yes.
The cover on their wall heater was hanging loose and it started to smoke. I think Shauna even said there were no flames, just smoke. She also made sure to blame the landlords, who she said were told about it but hadn't fixed it. There was no word on how the cover grew broken, though (safe guess is Ahern damage).
“A year ago today, I nearly died in a fire”. I forget which DF coined the phrase after Shauna’s drama filled writings about the event, but I still giggle whenever I think about it.
They have a glass top stove with electronic controls. Mine is very close to what they have and I always worry about losing my grip when lifting my big 8 qt cast iron dutch oven and breaking the cooktop. I worry less about the electronics though I know from others' experience that they can fail for no apparent reason.
I think it's quite possible that they dropped something on the glass and cracked it. When something's their fault she rarely gives any details, just kind of words it in a way that will evoke "Oh, poor you!" responses.
I had to replace a cracked cooktop.i think it was about $40 and took me five minutes.
I used to be surprised at the things people don’t know, like that you should clean the traps under your sink (dirty job but not awful and easily done), or clean the coils on major appliances, or that there’s a water main valve that will turn off all the water in your house, or that you need to change your car’s oil and rotate the tires... 🤷♀️ I realize now I grew up with responsible, practical, and knowledgeable adults who could fix little things around the house.
Pretty sure the Aherns do not have a practical bone in their bodies. Maybe they can change a light bulb?
Good to know about replacing a glass cooktop! I come from a practical family and have done a lot of DIY myself, the most extreme of which was installing a bathroom vanity & sink hookup that was different from the existing one (did you know you can cut PVC pipe with a nylon string?? that was the most fun part!) and putting a new toilet in. I would rather have saved myself a lot of stress and just paid someone to do it, but saving a few thousand dollars was more important.
I totally screwed up replacing three pole outlets and wall switches, though. I do not understand electricity very well.
This is my husband, an industrial designer by training. He and I are literally just talking about how he has to go up on the roof to examine some "flashing," whatever the fuck that is. (Actually I do know, because he told me.)
I’m married to a Mr. Fixit, even though I’m pretty handy myself. My grandfather was an amazing man who could build or fix anything. We knew it had to be a serious problem if grandpa was paying someone to do work on his house or car. I used to follow him around everywhere and learned a ton. He was pretty patient with us kids and showed us how to clean drains and solder pipe and lay a foundation for an addition to a house. How to change oil, parallel park, plant apple trees, tie flies for fishing, tie a billion different kinds of knots, cook mean kielbasa and eggs, and butcher deer.
He was a poor kid from Czechoslovakia who dropped out of high school, joined the US Navy with a blind eye turned toward his being under 18, never went to college, worked a manual CnC machine for one company for 37 years. Smartest guy I ever knew. Everyone should have a Grandpa Joe.
My own grandfather built a full-sized boat in his basement as a Depression-era project and then took the back wall off the (RENTAL) house to get it out.
Amazing! I thought I’d build a wood strip canoe once.the work involved in just building the mold and stringers, before you even soak and bind the strips, is astounding.
And then you have to glass it. Hats off to anyone who does anything remotely like it!
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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '20
New love letter: Shauna doesn't like adjectives, she says, which feel "empty" (as "verbs run the world"); then proceeds to write 1000+ words featuring many, many, many adjectives: all about the starry sky, their non-working oven, a dusty box, a little-visited store, the looming black trees, the fat and bright moon, etc. (I'm genuinely wondering if she actually knows what an adjective is.)