Adventures in unplanned retail

Behold our new refrigerator/freezer:

It actually makes cold! Unlike our old refrigerator/freezer, which stopped accomplishing cold-related tasks a week ago … just in time to ruin the Easter aspic. Which we didn’t make because we don’t celebrate Easter and I’m not even entirely sure what’s in aspic. But if we were Easter aspic eaters our non-cold-making refrigerator/freezer would have left us in a fine how-do-you-do.

Now avert your gaze from its fine shiny surface long enough to notice how it sits nestled next to a wall. (A wall covered in artifacts of my Norwegian heritage, which makes it a cool wall. But that’s not the point of this paragraph.) Now try to picture our old side-by-side refrigerator/freezer sitting next to that wall. Now try to picture us opening the left side-by-side door about a quarter of the way for three freaking years because that’s as far as it would open because that’s what happens when you’re a moron developer who designs a kitchen in such a way that you put a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer right next to a goddamn wall.

Thankfully, the moron developer installed a cheap-ass side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that lasted a whopping six years before it had to be replaced by a sturdy, EnergyStar-rated, non-side-by-side refrigerator. So though we hadn’t really wanted to drop more than a thousand dollars on appliances in the week before we drop a couple thousand dollars on a whirlwind Sondheim festival on Broadway—we leave in the morning!—we can at least open our goddamned freezer when we get back.

You may remember that we also had to buy a fancy new washer/dryer in February when the cheap-ass one from the cheap-ass developer stopped making motion and heat. And nobody wants to buy just one unplanned, unbudgeted-for major appliance in a three-month period. Nobody. Thankfully, we bought them from the same place. And thankfully and the domestic partner has the kind of balls I lack—the kind of balls that get you a sizeable discount on your second major appliance purchase in three months when you remind the lady on the phone that you bought the first one at full price.

So we leave for our Anyone Can Whistle/A Little Night Music/Sondheim on Sondheim tour secure in the knowledge that the milk will probably still be cold and the meat will probably still be pink when we get back. Even though the credit cards will still be very, very warm.