So, Christmas spending was wild and crazy. I needed to bounce back from that, but then my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer sort of broke its neck, and my ice maker in my fridge went seriously berserk. We’re talking a frozen waterfall–almost something I can imagine Sting writing lyrics about, with a dead salmon in it, but in this case, a dead pile of pork shoulder steaks with a “Reduced for Quick Sale” sticker on it.
When I was trying to get presents together for the kids last month, I went to the local appliance store to see if they had a refrigerator box I could turn into a playhouse for my 9 year-old daughter, and happened to momentarily have my eyes pop out of my head at the price tags. Have you seen how much fridges cost these days? Holy smokes. It jarred me–because before the frozen waterfall we’d been enjoying bad times with that appliance (and not enjoying them very much)* for about 5 years, with a persistent leak of water at the back of the fridge I’d been catching at first with one Tupperware bowl, that had grown to four Tupperware containers collecting as much as a gallon of water a day.
And $1700 for a new one wasn’t going to work for me. To make matters worse, $1700 for a new one hadn’t worked for anyone else, either, so I couldn’t make the playhouse. Bummer. Maybe the Easter Bunny will bring the kids one.
Anyway, the ice floe was bad, but then with my trusty Kitchen-Aid going wrong (it just bent its little head down too far and ended up scraping metal tool against metal bowl and making every single thing I made taste like metal), it felt like the Appliance-Ruining-Elves were working overtime here. (Come on, I know you secretly believe in these. They come to your house too. And they never break just one thing at a time, right?) Replacing the Kitchen-Aid wasn’t even on the radar screen of possibilities. We’d just have to do without homemade rolls for a few months or years.
But, by the grace of Heaven, I was blessed to marry a brilliant man. Despite his juris doctor degree from Georgetown, he’s no intellectual slouch. (Obligatory lawyer joke.) He knows his way around an owner’s manual and a you-tube “fix it yourself” video. For his New Year’s Day vacation, he disassembled the entire freezer, chipped about 40 pounds of ice out of it, replaced the faulty ice maker, realized it didn’t fully solve the problem, disassembled it again, and fixed the mega-drip in the back of the fridge. Then yesterday, he got out his trusty screwdriver set and repaired my poor, ailing mixer in a jiffer.
How can I resist him? He not only acts as beta reader for my light hearted romance novels, as well as my muse, but he also saves us about $2000 by just figuring stuff out so we don’t have to buy new stuff.
I’m a lucky girl.
