I learned a number of years ago that one of the reasons I exist is because my great-grandmother was buried up to her neck in dirt. This may be apocryphal.

My grandfather told me this story. He passed away more than a decade ago. When he was running a furniture store in Poughkeepsie, a business man showed up one day raising funds for some charity. As that got to talking, it turned out this fellow had grown up as a young man in Lithuania, and where my father's parents four parents came from. Even more interestingly, he knew Janova, the city of four of those great-grandparents of mine.

Then my grandfather discovers, the guy had lived in his grandparents' house—he was a yeshiva bocher, which literally means a young man who is studying. They had taken him in, maybe as a mitzvah, while he pursued Torah or academic studies.

I realize that all five of you have been wondering about the update to the dishwasher situation. It turned out worse case/best case.

To recap: everything went to hell in and around our house and then order resumed. The dishwasher, however, continued to leak. We talked to a highly rated local repairman, who advised us based on age and model to replace it. We tried. The installers came and claimed (maybe true) that they couldn't squeeze the replacement in. (Thanks, Sears, for charging my card and not refunding the price nearly four weeks later. Second pissy email sent, and will be filing a complaint with my credit-card company next.)

So we convinced the repairman to come out, who charged us $55 for an hour or more of testing and consultation, during which he determined that even if we put $300 of parts and a few hours of his time