Life tip: Don’t stick a baby food jar in the garbage disposal.

Somehow a glass baby food jar made its way into our garbage disposal this week. The way I found out was this: Karianne called me into the kitchen because the disposal was making a funny noise. I carefully inserted my hand to remove the obstruction, then pulled out a bloody stump.

Okay, that’s over dramatizing a bit, but I did cut my thumb. The disposal would only make a humming noise. What to do?

First, put it off for a few days. This is how I like to handle the catastrophic failure of major appliances — maybe it will “fix itself” somehow! Yeah, that works out real well.

Second, google “how to get glass out of a garbage disposal.” This was actually helpful, so here’s something I found. The bottom of a normal garbage disposal looks like this:

Our reset button was already pushed in, so I tried sticking an allen wrench in the “jam clear” socket in the center. I could rotate this, but with some resistance, so all I had to do was figure out how to get the glass out without slicing my hand up and I knew I could get the thing running again.

It turns out that the only tools you need for this are a butter knife, some barbecue tongs, and a flashlight. First I turned off the breaker that controls the disposal (safety first!). I used the flashlight and butter knife to find the larger chunks of glass and position them near the center, then I carefully reached in with the tongs and pulled them out. This felt exactly like playing the game “Operation!” 🙂

With the big chunks removed, I tried the “jam clear” again and it turned smoothly. I tried the disposal, and it’s now working fine!

You might be saying to yourself, “who cares? Why are you posting about this?” Well, partly because I’m not that handy, but I wish I was, so I’m feeling proud of myself for being able to fix something. But also because I think it’s great when people blog about things they figure out (how to fix things, what’s a good software program for problem X, I found a DVD player I like, that kind of thing), and I want to contribute something to that.

But don’t worry, cute baby pictures from Kaeta’s first birthday party will be forthcoming 🙂 Thanks for humoring me!