Annnnd… (after the transmission and the water heater last week.)

We need a new double oven.

Lesson learned for the day: always go in in person and see how they feel as well as look. Richard pulled on the handle of one to see the inside and there was a seam in the metal on the back side of the thing, flimsy and rough. On a $2000 oven!

What I’d really like is to tell the manufacturers to ditch the electronics and go back to dials. Plain and simple and far more durable than just-past-warranty. There were some with dials, for hundreds of dollars more, but they were all faking it–the ubiquitous motherboards hide inside. $850 a motherboard part per oven plus labor was the repair quote we got on ours. And now you know why they all make them that way: how else could you get a couple to want a third double oven in 20 years? Electronics in major appliances are the Wall Street derivatives of the industry.

The good part is, one of the stores we went to was Lowe’s and on the way out the door was a candy aisle for grownups:  spring seed packets.  A dollar twenty-eight, a marvelous antidote to sticker shock, and a thousand potential Burpee’s Big Boy tomatoes all packed in those tiny brown dots in there. I haven’t tried tomatoes from seed since we lived in New Hampshire and the poison ivy lurking in the woods somehow climbed and claimed them.

And on a happier note–I loved reading this story. A group of blood donors, asked to regularly contribute to keep a baby alive, who continued to do so month after month; “the John Muir baby,” that was all they knew.

For five years.

And then he lucked out on a bone marrow match, was cured of his vanishingly rare blood disease, and his mother wanted to thank all those unknown good people.

Four of them came. And so they got to meet the little kindergartner whose life they had saved, again and again and again, month by month by dogged, determined, meaningful but anonymous month. To meet that burst of real, happy energy that was all boy and a part of them always.

To life!