Day 26: Non-Surly Thursday

 Today I got my winter tires on, got a new phone, worked out, bought a new range, and tried a Popeye's chicken sandwich for the first time. I am happy, sore, tired, and poor. 

Matt took the day off, so we considered the round of driving around in the rain and fog and periodically dropping significant sums of money a date day. 

I think this is the least amount of time we ever took to decide on a new appliance. We walked into Corbeil and said what we needed and what we wanted - a smooth top, not induction, self-cleaning, convection would be nice -  and sales dude showed us an LG model and a GE model that were both discounted well for Black Friday and in our price range. The LG oven is cobalt blue inside. The sales guy said this is so when you turn the light on you can see the interior through the door better. This is absolutely why I chose it, not because it's SO PRETTY. I think we were in and out under half an hour.

So it sucked a bit that our biggest burner stopped working right before Christmas, but it worked out well that it was right before Black Friday, and this is the range we got when we got the house twenty-one years ago, so it has served us quite well (I think, honestly I really don't know how long a range should last, but given the plague of built-in obsolescence these days two decades seems not bad).

I did look briefly at the gas ranges - I know 'real' cooks prefer them - but I don't think I'm ready to deal with feeling like I'm about to blow myself up every time I want to boil an egg. Some neuroses I'm working on - some I'm just comfortable living with at this point.

The staff member who took the Rav from me this morning and told me when to pick it up could not have been lovelier. Ditto for the gentleman I dealt with when I picked it up - he did look at the paperwork and say "oh, give me a second, someone didn't close this out properly" so I was briefly concerned, but it turns out that Simon just didn't process the paperwork for our tires to be stored for the winter, so everything was fine (well, not for Simon, he was definitely in trouble). We even got a complimentary car wash, so I drove my extremely shiny black SUV home through the foggy, snowy landscape like some kind of middle-aged, perimenopausal, safety-minded, environmentally-shaky super-hero. 

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and happy week-end to everyone else