The House of Pain

This morning I was happily sleeping, when suddenly I was awakened by MaxieC poking me. He was all smiley, and then he ran away before I could swat him. So I took an old trick from The Mrs.'s playbook, and I put a pillow over my head.

A little while later, The Mrs. snuck in, reached under the pillow, and flicked me on the nose. I stirred a bit and tried to ignore it, so she did it again.

I believe the constitutes ground for divorce, but I decided to save that as a backup plan.

She was very excited to tell me that the oven was broken. At some time during the night, the control panel had decided to light up every LED it had and to start ignoring the buttons. I said, "We probably need to power cycle it."

So I shlepped myself out of bed (I hope the Democrats in my audience aren't deeply offended by my usage of Yiddish on occasion. I know how tres chic antisemitism is in the "progressive" movement these days, though it's cloaked in the guise of trendy faux-concern for the "plight" of the Palestinians and all. But I'm from Barfalo, where we have a large Yiddish-speaking population, and thus it is as ingrained in me as circular reasoning and the belief in the supremacy of emotional responses over logic is in you.) and headed to the garage to flip the breaker.

It didn't help. I tried it three times, each time waiting longer with it off in case there was a capacitive discharge issue, but still the oven control panel was non-responsive and had all its LED lit up. I declared, "Well, that's the extent of my ability to fix this. We'll have to call the appliance guy." (As previously noted in earlier posts, this house is built so crappily that we not only are on a first-name basis with a plumber, but we also have an appliance guy.)

The Mrs. has always hated the oven. She said, "Well, it'll probably be cheaper to just buy a new oven."

Right. I knew the oven she wanted, as she's been whining about this oven since we moved in. The oven she wants is $1749. Replacing the control module on a crappy GE oven is not going to be anywhere near that price.

But whatever. I made that last month off advertising on my trampoline post, so it's no big deal. I left The Mrs. in charge of buying the new oven, which I believe she didn't do. It's special-order only at Lowe's. There are about 10 other appliance stores around that carry KitchenAid. I imagine I'll be calling them on Saturday.

I'm pretty sure she willed it to die. She's crafty like that.