My mother’s loose screws *

In which our Hero finds a small appliance left on his doorstep

My slow drift to my first early sleep in exhausted months was interrupted by a knock on the door. My mother was revealed behind it. Holding a “mini” blender that she wanted me to take a look at. It’s not an unusual thing, my mother brings me appliances from time to time, with the hope that I can save them. Sometimes I can, but usually I can’t, because appliances are designed to be cheap and disposable to start with and my mother has too many pieces that were not from the high end of that uninspiring spectrum.

I always warn her up front that she shouldn’t expect much. Maybe I can find something, but more likely I can’t. I can fix a switch, I’m not going to fix a transformer. (That’s math. I don’t see the risk (of fire) matching the reward of (20 dollar blender)). She’s always disappointed when I say that. Always. Not too seriously, but enough to make me shake my head in exasperation.

This time, however, was a little different. Because she handed me the blender upside down. In pieces. And then the tray of screws she’d pulled out of it. Oh no… She wanted to see if something had burnt out, so she took it apart herself before bringing it to me. I was telling my father about it the next day, and he grinned and told me, “She’s been working on it for two days. When I found her, she was looking through the toolbox and holding the drill.”

Oh no.

So here’s a thing. Some of the art of fixing things is in knowing how they’re put together. Assembling something is a lot easier when you start from the assembly because you can set it in your mind, how things fit, which screws go where. But more than that, there are often linkages that might fit a few ways but only one actually works, and the original setup shows that way. Plastic bits that are easy to break.

I went to get a screwdriver and she stopped me. “I already have one,” she said, handing me a small slotted screwdriver that explained the slightly stripped Phillips heads on the screws she’d taken out. It sounds like I’m making fun, but aside from OCD-driven exasperation, I’m delighted by this impulse in her, by the fearless strides into something that is not her area. Some of me comes from that. And some of her is yet another little girl, curious about what’s inside, how it works, how it fits together.

The rest of her, however, is pretty ornery when she’s got me staying still long enough to hit. After peering at the switch assembly a bit, she offers me the benefit of her wisdom: “It’s not to late to go to school and become and electrician. I don’t know why we sent you to engineering.”

(In the end, the patient was dead. An electrical fault in the fine wires of windings on one side of the electromagnet that drives the motor. I can’t fix it without unwinding it, and I can’t unwind it without cracking the coating on the wire, and then it’s short circuiting elephants all the way down)

In telling this story, a horrified listener was distressed that my mom had lost the use of the blender I’d just got for her. But no, I answered, “My mom has lots of blenders,” leading to a conversational sidebar that I am bringing to you, Gentle Reader, for summary judgement.

I was asked, “What do you mean lots of blenders?” I replied 4. The one I got her, the one it replaced, the mini blender, and the coffee grinder, which I know can be argued is not a blender but is still a blade on a high torque motor so it counts. One blender is plenty, and two blenders happens, but three blenders is a little absurd to me, and four… In the economy of personal blenders, four is a lot.

I think that “A lot” is a scale that moves with context. It has a judgement in it, an assessment of facts. One of anything is something people could just have because they have it. Beyond that.. Well… it depends.

If you have a penny, that’s a penny. If you have two pennies, that’s some pennies. If you pay off your mortgage with 50000 dollars in pennies, well that’s a lot of pennies.

If you have an aircraft carrier, on the other hand, that’s pretty impressive. Hey, nice aircraft carrier dude. If you have five, however, this now takes you into the realm of judgement. Because if you are the United States of America, that’s just a piece of your fleet. Whereas if you are, say, a gas-station attendant by trade, you have a LOT of air craft carriers. See what happened there, Gentle Reader?

And I, as a man, have four pairs of shoes. It’s an absurd quantity for someone having but one pair of feet and even less sense of fashion. I’m embarrassed by the fact that I have lots of shoes. (Whereas for a woman, I don’t think four sets even gives you a spanning minimum set for a typical wardrobe)

Bringing me back to my mother, who is a private citizen not running a smoothie bar or even inclined to frozen drinks, and has more blenders than makes any logical sense. Four blenders. Even if you broke that down by task, she has two task blenders and two intermediate blenders that could arguably switch roles.

It’s a lot, no question. And certainly not cause for extended teasing from someone who’ll remain unnamed but seems to feel that “lots” requires an ordinal sufficiency greater than single digits.

I just found my mother sitting in front of the iPad on it’s stand, laughing so hard she wasn’t making a sound.

“What are you watching?” I asked her.

She couldn’t explain, so I wandered to where I could see the screen. On which was the camera app and a picture of her hands quivering as she laughed, which made her laugh more.

“Those are your hands,” I pointed out helpfully. Just in case she thought she was watching a video.

“But I was trying to go to google!”

*Edit*

Okay. So for the record…

Blender is a blender, and it’s hard to sauce things without.

Coffee grinder is different from a blender because it’s a very small volume and usually lower torque. So it’s kind of unique.

Food processor has mounts for attachments that standard blenders don’t have. I prefer a mandoline, but food processor is distinct.

Stand mixers allow *way* lower speeds than blenders, and again, have mountpoints for cool things like meat grinders, and ice cream makers, and ice cream makers. Pastathingers.

Immersion blender and hand mixer are similar, so I think you could probably find one device that serves both purposes, but either way, they have a different use. And I used to think an immersion blender was redundant but I’ve burned myself too many times making sauce. (My main complaint is that immersion blenders seem to need some kind of load balancer because every single one I’ve read reviews of complains of burnouts. I wonder how horribly expensive it would be to make one with a continuous transmission.)

I still think it’s more of a question of an adapter, but hand mixers allow you to bring the tool to the stuff rather than the stuff to the tool. So not sure they’re different from each other, but distinct from a blender blender.

So nobody’s startled me. But my mom has three blenders. Not mixers, not processors. Blenders.

(Also, I’ve got 7 or 8 book cases and I still have boxes and boxes of books)

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