Current Situation

 Let me begin by saying that I am not complaining in any way, shape, or form.  God blessed me with a wonderful, hard working husband who has always provided for our family well and who was raised by a father to be very handy with home maintenance.  In my almost 50 years of marriage he has always managed to take care of our needs while I was a stay at home mom and I never saw anything he couldn’t fix.

So, the week of Thanksgiving we found ourselves in a conundrum.  We make yogurt twice a week because he eats it on his diabetic diet.  We double the recipe so we have LOTS of yogurt — two of those very large Pyrex mesuring cups full.  Yesterday we only made one though.  

I digress.  The thing is we were due to make yogurt the day before Thanksgiving and I found myself juggling two of these monsters along with a whole turkey and an enormous bowl of potato salad, trying to shove it all in a counter depth refrigerator.  Aside from my hands not letting me stir up the potato salad the frustration of trying get everything into the fridge was mounting.  I mentioned we needed to buy a bigger fridge.

I have learned over the years to time those sorts of comments just right because if I do, it will happen. Not being manipulative, just thoughtful and intentional.

Lo and behold, a week after Thanksgiving we were buying a new fridge.  Well, a matching oven and microwave combo caught his eye.  Our current oven is the original one in the house and going on 20 years old.  It works fine but I can’t read the temperature display and it sits really low which is not good with Trixie because she wants to “help”.  Very dangerous.

So, two days later we had the new oven.  However, he decided to install it himself because he has to alter the cabinet that it goes in.  So, my son in law came over yesterday to help him install it because this thing weighs 200 lbs and I am useless.  Didn’t happen because the hole in the cabinet wasn’t big enough so we will revisit it again this evening after more alteration is done.

So, this is my current situation -

My house WAS clean.  Now it is a disaster.  Our bulky trash pickup comes once a month and it was just this last week so I suspect I will have this old oven sitting in the corner of the kitchen through the holidays.  The good thing is the week of bulky pickup people drive around and “steal” useable goods.  I am sure the perfectly good oven will go to a home that can use it. We usually try to place the “good” stuff on the curb separate from the truly trash stuff that just needs to go to wherever they take it so it is easy for the scavengers to pick it up.  This time I had a small table and chair set for little kids and since my littles aren’t very little anymore I figured somebody could use it.  So, when one of the trucks came by the gentleman get out of the truck, looked the set all over and put it in the cab of the truck with him.  This made me happy because there are more little memories to be made with that set — it was like new and will serve somebody well for a long time.

So, anyway, I am dancing around two ovens in my not-so-huge galley kitchen, the dining room looks like it has been swallowed by packing material and there are tools everywhere.  

As I said, though, I am not complaining — I look at that and count my blessings — I have a roof over my head even though it isn’t new and fancy, my husband is still with me to take care of these sorts of things and he enjoys doing it, he has the knowledge to make it happen, I have a son in law who is willing to help and I now have the old refrigerator in the garage so I have lots of room for yogurt.  Life is good.

And this is Trixie’s new trick —

It is really blurry because she was on the run but when she gets done with her food, we are feeding her out of paper bowls which I recognize isn’t a really good idea but it is helping to get her to eat, she takes the bowl and runs off with it and hides it in her bed.  She is such a pill!