major appliances

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Five for Friday

This has been my kid’s second five-day school week since the beginning of 2026, which seems wrong in all sorts of ways. It has also had the effect of feeling incredibly long. Don’t worry – we don’t have another five-day school week until March.

Five random things on my mind today.

Another Mystery

I have a tea subscription that supposedly arrived Wednesday. I got the confirmation email, complete with a photo of the box in my mailbox. The confirmation email, strangely, said “Your package was left near the front door or porch.” even though my mailbox is near the street and not near my front door. Whatever, the driver must have checked the wrong box, the photo clearly shows it in my mailbox.


I did not check my email or the mail on Wednesday, which feels like a crucial point. But yesterday, when I finally read the confirmation email, I went to the mailbox and retrieved a whole pile of magazines and letters and bills and junk mail. But no box. Neither was the box on our front porch, nor was it near the backdoor. I interrogated my family members, but neither of them had retrieved a box. I looked in the cupboard where I normally keep my tea; nothing. WHERE IS MY TEA? My theory is that the mailman opened the box to put in Thursday’s mail, was unable to fit it securely around the box, and removed the box temporarily to put the rest of the mail in. Then he forgot about the box and drove away with it. I’m hoping he returns the box today, but I suppose we’ll see.

Palm Update

I have been babying my palm trees (which did not adjust well to moving indoors this winter) and they both have some new growth. One of them is still struggling – some of the new growth has already turned brown, and it’s not putting out as many new shoots as the other. But the other one seems almost happy? It would possibly be more happy if the cat didn’t so thoroughly enjoy nibbling on its leaves. I really hope I can keep them alive until it warms up enough for them to move back into the sunroom. They liked it much better out there.

Everything Falls Apart

When it snows, it dumps, right? Well, first the freezer in our garage refrigerator died, taking along with it a ton of food.

Then my oven started acting up, which is something it does periodically, and about which I have complained extensively before. (It doesn’t seem to want to heat to the correct temperature. However, an oven repair guy came out to check it – along with the other, more expensive oven, which somehow has the same problem – and after three hours and $300 told me both ovens are just fine and perhaps it is user error.) I made these cookies (which are just as delicious in February as they are in November) on Wednesday and the oven refused to heat to 350 degrees. It just got stuck at 340. But it was still in preheating mode. I am assuming, with no actual knowledge whatsoever, that the preheating mode injects extra heat into the oven, and that’s why my cookies got quite crisp around the edges before they were supposed to be done. (They were still scrumptious.) I wrote this off to me not allowing the oven enough time to come up to temperature. Then, later that night, I preheated the oven to 400 for dinner, left it alone… and completely forgot about it because the “I’m done preheating” beep never happened. An hour later, I remembered that I hadn’t put anything into the oven, and hurried into the kitchen to find that the oven was still preheating and still at 395. Okay, fine. I will turn it off and try again. Then it got stuck at 370 until I finally gave up and used the air fryer. This morning, however, I set it to 350 to reheat a breakfast sandwich, and it worked exactly as it was supposed to. Either it was having an off day on Wednesday and is back to full strength, or it only heats to 350.

After I dropped off Carla, I went into the basement to walk on the treadmill for awhile. But when I powered it on, it said it was paused. And no amount of pressing the pause button, the stop / start button, powering it off and back on, or unplugging it and plugging it back in made the pause screen go away. Obviously, none of these things is dire. We are fortunate in that we have both a second freezer and a second oven, which allows us to meet our freezing and baking needs. The garage fridge is pretty old – we bought it in 2012. And the oven is probably 10 to 15 years old (and seemed to have never once been cleaned before we moved in, so who knows what kind of maintenance it had). The treadmill is even older. My in-laws bought it when they lived in Europe back in the early aughts. They brought it back to the States with them in 2005ish, and then gave it to us in the early 2010s. It has served long and hard.

To recap, these losses are not dire and were going to happen sometime anyway. But I hadn’t anticipated that they would happen so close together. As we use all three of these appliances daily, we will be replacing them. Good times.

Avocados

I am not particularly interested in the Super Bowl this year, but my husband is excited about making a seven layer dip. I do not care for seven layer dip, but I will make the guacamole and eat plenty of that. Our grocery store had a nice sale on avocados – $1 apiece – so I bought a few. And then I went to Trader Joe’s and they had ENORMOUS avocados for $1.49 apiece. I had to buy two, just to see if they are as good as the normal little guys. I will try to remember to report back.

Cat Curiosity

My cat continues to be the best cat. He exemplifies the whole “cats are curious” personality type, and is constantly investigating everything. The exterminator came the other day to check our mouse bait and he said, of Lenny, “He’s a nosy little guy, isn’t he?” Yes. Lenny has to be where the action is, and he needs to be apprised of anyone entering the house and insists on doing a thorough inspection of their shoes and any bags they might bring.

He is, of course, wildly curious about Outside. Any time a door opens, our security system chimes, and that’s the cue for Lenny to beeline to the door and try to sneak out. We usually keep the laundry room door closed, so that it acts as a sort of airlock between the kitchen and the garage. He knows that we often disappear when we go into the laundry room, and that we appear through that door at the end of the day. As soon as the door chimes, he takes up a spot near the door – usually on the floor just inside the kitchen, but sometimes on the counter right next to the laundry room door. Then he greets us with a deep stretch and some little chirpy meows.

This week, he’s taken to hiding in the laundry room while we’re in there putting our shoes and coats on. He is a very good hider. So good, in fact, that one day he was unable to extricate himself from his hiding place. Can you find him? Slide the photo to the left to reveal his location.

That’s all I have for today. It’s snowing here, once again. I hope you are warm and cozy and that you have a restful weekend.

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Unexpected Microwave

My microwave broke, so I had to buy a new one.

That sentence right there conveys absolutely none of the dismay and panic I felt. Plus, it makes it sound like the microwave just up and expired, all by its lonesome, when really I BROKE IT. I BROKE MY MICROWAVE. DURING A PANDEMIC.

Yesterday, I opened the microwave to remove something I’d heated and THE DOOR BROKE. Right there in my hand. The bottommost panel of the microwave door, right beneath the handel, separated from the rest of the door. And the door would no longer close and also started to feel quite loose on its hinge.

Listen, I am already dealing with an Ongoing Refrigerator Saga, which I will probably tell you about at some point but which causes me TORRENTIAL FRUSTRATION, and I cannot – CANNOT – deal with fiddling around with another appliance. The fridge is too costly to replace (if I even could, during a pandemic, when appliances are in SHORT SUPPLY) and also, it – SO FAR – maintains the minimum functions required of a fridge, like “holding food” and “cooling things” and “producing ice.” This could change at any moment, I recognize, and I am fervently grateful for the second fridge we have downstairs. (Yes, yes, these are Not Problems type of problems, I am aware.)

(Side Vent: In the nine years we have occupied this house, we have bought a new fridge and oven/range, replaced the dishwasher, the washer and dryer, three faucets [kitchen, bathroom, laundry room], a shower head, the water heater, two trees, and a toilet. We should also possibly replace the windows. And now the microwave. And also the fridge sucks and if I had a spare $$$ lying around I would definitely replace that. I am grateful that a) this didn’t happen all at once and b) we had the means to do so without significant financial strain, but OMG is this normal??? I have never owned a house before so maybe gradually replacing everything is just what it means to be a homeowner but it seems like a lot!)

Anyway. Speaking of Not Problems problems. No one needs a microwave. I mean, I guess if you live in a house with no other means of heating your food, then a microwave is a necessity. So I will backtrack and say: I personally do not need a microwave. It is a nicety. A luxury appliance. But nonetheless, I have always been in possession of a microwave and therefore much of my cooking/eating life has been arranged around the fact of a working microwave. For instance, my daughter eats pancakes that I microwave for her almost every morning. (Yes, I could make pancakes from scratch every morning, as Carla and my inner Snarky Pinterest Mom so helpfully and logically pointed out, but I am not going to do that.) We can survive without a microwave. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t have a microwave, after all, and, in fact, would look askance – deeply askance – at me for my microwave dependency. 

And yet I went to my local appliance store this morning, ten minutes before it opened, for the express purpose of buying a new microwave. 

I have heard rumblings about the appliance shortages that have arisen during the pandemic. And let me tell you, this is REAL. Even though it is a random Monday, and even though I had arrived ten minutes early, I was only the fifth or so person inside the store, and the parking lot was filling up behind me. There were no available salespeople on the floor when I went in; they were all talking to customers. So I stood there stupidly, trying to project an air of I Should Be Helped Next as another customer entered the store and made her way to the part of the store where additional staff members were busily not looking at us. 

Near me was a customer looking at dishwashers. “I really recommend you get one of the machines we have in stock here in the store,” the salesperson was telling her apologetically. “Otherwise, it could be at least six to eight weeks before you get yours.” 

I looked toward the checkout area, a long desk at the far end of the showroom behind which are several offices with doorless doorways that open into the showroom itself. I was staring because not a single one of the six or seven people in those offices was wearing a mask. This included two people who were in the showroom, talking on the phone. I had a moment of panic – I should leave, right? How can they not be wearing masks? Have they not heard about the pandemic? But… there was a sign on the door saying masks were required, so… perhaps they don’t understand that staff should wear masks, too?

“… yep, already full and people staring at me,” said the unmasked salesman into the phone, making eye contact with me. Then, as the woman who’d come in behind me made a beeline for him, he hung up and pointed at me. “How can I help you?”

Staying where I was, in the middle of the store, while he put on a mask, I called to him that I needed a new microwave. He made some pretense of showing me the microwave floor models, mumbling all the while that he didn’t think they had any of these ones, or these ones… and then he kind of threw up his hands and said, “crazy, crazy times” and we quickly returned to his computer station where he looked up whether he actually had any microwaves in stock. 

This is where I told him that I’d looked on the store’s website, which had claimed to have a specific GE model in stock. We would take that one, I said. He typed on his keyboard. Then he went into the back to look at what was available.

He returned, shaking his head. “I don’t have any of that model in stock,” he said. “I can sell you one, and order it, but honestly, I have no earthly idea when it will arrive. We aren’t even getting estimates for timeframes anymore. I could do the same with a Whirlpool microwave, but honestly, they’re even worse than GE.”

Was I going to have to go somewhere else to buy a microwave? Would Best Buy or Home Depot have any better selection? I was starting to feel anxious about the possibility – this store is close to my house and has a relationship with a reputable installation service and we’ve used them for ALL our appliances, so I feel comfortable with them. Plus, I like supporting a local company. But now I pictured schlepping all over town trying to find a stupid microwave that wouldn’t take an indefinite amount of time to arrive, being turned away from store after store by harried staff members trying to fight against the desperate crush of appliance-hungry customers. 

“I mean, we probably do have a few options here in the store, but they start getting really expensive.”

Turns out, internet, I would rather go without a microwave than spend $800 on one. I kind of stared at the salesman, thinking about my new, austere, microwave-free lifestyle. Perhaps I would write a book about it. A how-to guide of sorts: MicroWAVE Your Old Food Heating Habits Goodbye. Maybe I would need to buy a toaster oven. Could I really see myself becoming a Toaster Oven Person?

He interpreted my reverie as pleading, and kept typing. I have no idea what he was doing. He could have been making a grocery list. Or writing his own tell-all about the Great Appliance Panic of 2020. Maybe he was journalling. “November 16, 2020: Dear Diary. Another day of people needing new refrigerators. Why have all the refrigerators in the country simultaneously failed? Another day of my colleagues pretending that there is a forcefield separating the air of the offices from the air of the showroom. Another day of customers looking at me as though they can manifest a non-existent appliance through the power of staring.”

Miraculously, through the magic of my unfocused stare, he discovered that he had, in the warehouse, a very basic GE that would work as a replacement for my microwave. “It doesn’t do much more than heat,” he said regretfully. “But there is a button to stop the turntable from turning if you want that.” (Why would I want that? Why would anyone want that? Isn’t giving your leftover soup a spin around the ol’ heat carousel the whole point of a microwave?)

“Great,” I told him, microwave relief flooding me. “I am fine with basic.” I need a microwave that can heat my food and maybe act as a timer, that’s it. What kind of functions are these $800 microwaves performing that are so much better? Setting the table? Complimenting your cooking? Chewing the food for you? Heat the food. Beep when it’s done. That’s all I need from a microwave. 

The salesman gestured to the floor model of the microwave he’d located so I could examine it, check the price, etc. “It’s fine,” I said, giving it a cursory glance to ensure it wasn’t $800 (turns out it was even less than the option I’d scouted online), and handing over my credit card with the barely controlled panic of someone finding the country’s very last Tickle Me Elmo on Christmas Eve during a year when Tickle Me Elmo is the Country’s Hottest Toy. 

“I’m just glad you had something to sell me,” I told him. 

“It’s been utter pandemonium,” he told me. “You should see it in here on Saturdays. It’s like we’re throwing a big party or having the year’s biggest sale. Every. Saturday.”

He shook his head. “And it’s getting even busier, even though the COVID numbers keep rising. And a lot of the people we see? Are real old folks.” Here he pointed over my shoulder at the woman who’d come in behind me. “She’s no spring chicken,” he said. “Well, I’m not either. But you have to wonder, what are they doing?”

He went on: “This pandemic has been so hard on everyone. Well,” he reconsidered. “Not on us. This is our best year ever.” The way he said it – coupled with the purple hollows under his eyes – didn’t really sell me on the “best” part of his sentence. I really hope he and his fellow salespeople get significant bonuses for dealing with all these people clambering over one another to get their grubby paws on the last available electric range, that’s for sure.

He was able to schedule the installation of my new microwave/removal of my old microwave (which means I will have another human in my house later this week, yikes) and took my payment. I didn’t get to take the microwave with me – the installation company will pick it up from the warehouse and bring it to me on Thursday. Frankly, it made me a little uncomfortable to leave without it in my room temperature hands. I kept waiting for someone – No Spring Chicken, perhaps – to swoop in and buy it out from under me. I guess we’ll see, come Thursday, whether I actually bought a microwave or some stainless steel air.

All in all, I was in and out of there in twenty minutes flat. Then I came home and reheated leftovers on the stove for lunch because that is a perfectly reasonable, if more time consuming, way to reheat things. 

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Friday Randomosity: This One Has No Discernible Theme Edition

Well, it is FRIDAY. Spring break looms! I am looking forward to READING. Here’s some randomosity for you.

We replaced our water heater. Our old one was small-ish – you couldn’t have two people take back-to-back showers and expect for the second person to have hot water – and in the past couple of months, it had begun knocking every time you even washed a spoon. The water heater’s death knell, if you will. It was nearly 10 years old anyway, and supposedly water heaters only last 7 to 10 years. So it was an anticipated replacement, and we were glad to upgrade to a larger tank and happy to end our game of Will It Leak chicken. Our plumbing company is excellent, and I have never had a bad experience. But when the plumber wheeled the new tank in, he pointed out that it had a dent in it. “Ding,” he called it, which seems so flimsy and insignificant a thing. But to me, it looked like a DENT.

Water tank 1

Ding or dent?

He assured me that it was cosmetic only and reminded me that their warranty covers parts and labor should it turn out to be NON cosmetic, which is less reassuring a comment than perhaps he thought it might be. And he would chop a few hundred bucks off the cost, he said. He would be happy to swap it out for a new one, he said, but there was no guarantee the next one would be ding free; these things get bumped and banged around on trucks and he sees dings ALL the time! Some even worse than ours! And he wouldn’t be able to tell if the new one had a ding in it until he took it out of the box. Plus, he didn’t have another one on his truck, so he’d have to leave and go back to the shop. But it was really up to me. Then he looked at me expectantly. I said, okay, go ahead and install it. But inside, I was yelling, no! Don’t give me a dented water heater!

Listen. When I buy a thing, I want it to be Pristine. Maybe a scratch in a refrigerator door or a ding dent in a water heater has no impact on the functioning of said appliance. I don’t care. Part of the reason for getting a new thing is that it is new. No one has put their grubby ketchup-covered hands all over it or rammed it with a broom handle or knocked a ladder into it. My oven has a permanent stain around one of the burners and some scratches from being careless when removing the cast iron grates when cleaning it. The door handle of my freezer is kind of wobbly because the shortest member of our family insists on leaning on it despite repeated requests to the contrary. Our kitchen table is stippled with the wounds of a fork being jabbed into it repeatedly, not to mention some ballpoint pen marks that refuse any attempt to remove them. These things happen. Normal wear and tear. But when a thing is NEW, part of the fun – nay, part of the very thing I am PAYING FOR – is the fresh, clean, lack of marks-and-scrapes-and-dingsdents.

When we got our dining room table and chairs and our barstools from Crate & Barrel many years ago, ALL of them had issues. A couple of the barstools were wobbly – which the delivery person tried to blame on my uneven floors (which are not uneven, thank you) and some of the very expensive, all-wood dining chairs had scratches in them. I made the person take them back and get us new ones. (I think it took more than one re-delivery to get non-scratched dining chairs, OMG.)

I always worry that I am being overly picky. The people who are trying to get you to accept the scratched/dingeddented items certainly make it out like I am being wholly unreasonable – it’s just a little scratch! You can still sit perfectly well in a chair with a deep vertical gouge in one of the legs! And maybe I am being unreasonable, I don’t know.

Whatever. The dinged dented water heater leaked so the plumber had to get a new one anyway.

Water tank 2

El Dento before it was hooked up and began to leak and was then summarily removed.

I have a Shrimp PSA for you, Internet.You may be aware that shrimp have a “vein” on their backs, yes? And that you should remove it before eating? (It’s not a vein; it’s the shrimp’s digestive tract or something equally gross.) Well, when I buy shrimp, I try to get it shelled and de-veined so I don’t have to deal with disemboweling the things before I cook them. (Or deal with looking at their creepy bug eyes and legs and exoskeleton.) (Why do I eat these things?) Well, the other day, I was prepping the shrimp for the shrimp scampi meal I love to eat, and I noticed that there was a long, dark stripe on the underside of the shrimp. Maybe the de-veiner missed one, I thought. No, ALL of the shrimp had it. I painstakingly removed one gruesome string after another. Ew. I looked at the bag the shrimp come in. It said clearly that they are DE-VEINED. Well! I was going to for sure call the company and complain.

Turns out that shrimp (I learned after Googling, fortunately not after yelling at some poor shrimp customer service rep) have TWO “veins.” One is the digestive tract and the other is the circulatory system. A de-veined shrimp has been relieved of the former; the latter remains. Apparently you can eat the circulatory stuff just fine. But… EW.

So now I am weighing my preference for shrimp over chicken against my preference for not removing a creature’s circulatory system. I really don’t like being reminded AT ALL that the shrimp I am about to devour was once a living creature. It’s bad enough that I have to remove their tails; I do not want to do anything else. But now YOU can make the decision BEFORE shelling out $20 for a bag of veiny shrimp.

Do you think other omnivores and carnivores feel this sort of squeamishness about their prey? I mean, not cats. Cats are sadists (and I say that with love, because cats are my all-time favorite animal). What other explanation is there for a) toying with a mouse until it is nearly dead with fear and b) leaving the bones and fur of one’s meal on the threshold between one’s human’s bedroom and the hall in the spot most ideal for being stepped on by said human and c) gleefully presenting one’s human with the innards of a mouse as a gift?

Do you think bears are happiest when they are eating berries, and, although they recognize that creatures are probably higher-yield in terms of nutrition, get all yicked out when they have to catch a writhing salmon in their bare teeth? Do you think owls squeeze their eyes shut as they swoop down to grab a mouse for dinner and say, “Eeeesh, I really wish this thing didn’t have whiskers”? Do you think lions are all, “If only my zebra came de-hooved!”? I, for one, want my meat to be as far removed from Living Thing as it possibly can be. Ground beef does a great job at looking Not Alive. Same with a fillet of, say, tilapia. Anything with bones gets a little too close for comfort. Down this road vegetarianism lies, I know, but I really am not capable of giving up tacos.

I have a new favorite kitchen gadget! My husband got me this amazing can strainer, which I LOVE. I make lots of things with canned black beans and chickpeas and kidney beans, and it is such a pain to get out a big unwieldy strainer to strain and rinse one or even two cans of beans. The strainers take up so much room in the dishwasher, and their handles get in the way of other dishes and it’s just so annoying. And then I have to do the weird dance of rushing the rinsed beans over to the pot on the stove, dripping water all over the counter and the floor. So when I received this can strainer as a birthday gift a few weeks ago, I was DELIGHTED. And it works very well! It’s small, so I can just put it on the top rack of the dishwasher, and it takes up very little room. My only complaint – and it’s really more of an observation – is that it seems to take longer to rinse the beans than it does with the strainer; they are more crammed together in the smaller confines of the can than in the roomier strainer. But otherwise, it’s wonderful. Plus, it’s cheap: the one I have is selling on Amazon for under $4. Or there is a stainless steel option that’s under $8.

Can strainer

Photo from amazon.com

There is a particular kind of lentil soup I am obsessed with. It comes from my local Lebanese restaurant, and it’s light and lemony and soooooo good. It is also $5 a bowl, which is reasonable as a treat but not on a day-to-day basis. So I have tried to make it at home and continue to fail.

This recipe is quite good – Lemony Lentil Soup from Gimme Some Oven – but the restaurant version doesn’t have any carrots in it. So, seeing as I really detest cooked carrots anyway, this is not going to cut it as a substitute.  This Middle Eastern Lentil Soup from BBCGoodFood is closer, and I really like the bright note that the turmeric adds, but it’s still not right. There is definitely no turmeric in the restaurant soup. Cumin, maybe… but even that I’m not sure of.  I don’t know what else to try, to get it closer to the restaurant soup. Any ideas? Based off of… nothing, since you aren’t eating the same soup I am? Still – I am hoping you will know exactly which spice will make it taste right. And I am willing to experiment. Lentil soup is GOOD.

Lentil Soup

My attempt to make the Middle Eastern Lentil Soup with a few add-ons. Good but not right. Also, the restaurant tops its soup with crunchy little pita wontons. And that makes ALL the difference. So yummy! But I could not get my hands on any pita wontons the day I made this soup.

Well, that’s all the randomosity I have for you today, Internet! What’s going on in your neck of the woods?