New Fridge Happy Dance

 After all that effort of cleaning and re-cleaning after the fire evacuation, the Refrigerator of Doom has been replaced. It decided on New Year's Eve to stop being a refrigerator and just be a cabinet. Ahem. After two weeks of buying ice for our coolers and using a dorm fridge, the replacement was delivered last week. Halleleuia! Cue the Snoopy Happy Dance Music:

It was terribly exciting and honestly a little scary to have actual people in our house that aren't us. It's been quite a while because of the lockdown and all. The delivery guys were inside for less than 10 minutes. It's amazing how easy it is to move a refrigerator when you have the right tools and a team that knows what they're doing. Truly the most exciting thing to happen in months and months at our house, which says a lot about this era, doesn't it?

The water is good, and even better, the ice doesn't have that funky aftertaste that never really went away, so I'm really happy. And wow did I ever miss having ice water whenever I felt like it. That's how I drink most of my water during the day, and I think I was mildly dehydrated the last couple of weeks.

I'm not going to get into a big thing on planned obsolescence, but c'mon, that fridge didn't even make it to 5 years!! Having literal bells and whistles, well electronic songs at least, is not what we as consumers want or need. We want the big ticket item things that we buy to last. What a waste of metal and plastic and all the electronics that fridge was. It makes me agree even more with the premise of the Brave Little Toaster. 

We are feeling very lucky that we are in the position to be able to buy another appliance without a big problem, and to refill it with all the food we had to throw away. And that there was one available without a several month wait like there was right after the fire. Taking all this for granted has been a real eye opener for me. Fingers crossed that I'm not revisiting this subject in less than five years!

Now to figure out how to cut off the *(#*&%(#* plastic wrap without ruining the exterior.

Power On Power Off

Well hello there. Our power has been out since Sunday because of a PSPS (Public Safety and Power Shutdown) thanks to our not so wonderful power company, PG&E. It was several days of forecasted high winds and the extremely dry conditions which equal what's called a Red Flag warning. PG&E is basically C.Y.A. by turning off the power just....in....case. Instead of replacing the equipment, they inconvenience tens of thousands of their customers. Grrrrrrr.

This picture was taken right after the power shut off and after we got one of the LED lanterns on, it's a shadow of the Halloween pennant banner on the ceiling. I thought it might make a good addition to my collection of shadow pictures.

When the power goes out, the internet which we get through cable goes out within a few hours. They don't have much of an infrastructure of batteries to keep it going. And that means we lose our home phone which is VOIP. At least this time the cell towers kept working so we still had cell service. It makes me think that AT&T must have upped the batteries or installed solar panels or something. Because in the past it was scary when our power was out, because of the extreme weather and worry about a fire, and your phones are all out so you can't get a warning from the fire department to evacuate. 

The power came back on just after 10pm last night. It gets very old very fast running a generator all day, it's so loud and I hate all the power cords all over the house. It's a miracle none of us tripped down the stairs.

I got some sewing done thanks to said extension cords, nothing exciting, mostly mending and other things like that weren't worth taking pictures of. It wasn't the right lighting to work on my Rock Candy piece because I wanted to rearrange the elements and that would have a lot to do with the colors which were impossible to see clearly. So I guess I'll be back onto that today.

Consolation Shopping

What do you do after a doctor's appointment where you see the evidence of why both of your knees hurt and are so very noisy? (Oh hello there arthritis)
Well you drive yourself down the block to the LQS to drown your sorrows in all the glorious colors and patterns of course.
And proceed to eavesdrop as a random passerby (a man of course) quizzes the quilt shop's long-arm quilter. She patiently explained that yes, it's all automatic, that is once you get the quilt sandwich set up on the machine, but first someone had to make the top and the back of the quilt, and then there are thousands of patterns to choose from, and they have to be resized and placed just so and then the thread has to be chosen and so it's not really so very automatic at all now is it.