Bumps in the road

As much as I like to think that life is just rainbows, the reality of it is there are some rough roads out there too. Making me 'practice what I preach' as far as 'choosing joy' is concerned. That's pretty much the summery of the past two days...only one thing went as planned and that was because it was the first thing of the day yesterday! I made it to my second day of water aerobics at the YMCA! Had started this last fall when I injured my leg after Ike and was pretty faithful until temps dropped down to 45 (it's an outdoor pool) and this week I made the decision it was time to go again. M/W/F -- I'm 2 for 3 so far this week...from there it's sorta gone down hill or off the beaten path so to speak.

Yesterday my son calls to say that his car had been towed from his apartment complex...he parked in the wrong place...so there were several hours spent trying to negotiate and get his his car out of hawk...I'll spare the details but we were given a break on the towing fee due to the area being unclear that it was indeed a no parking zone..so that ended well...but it took up my afternoon and the rest of the day seemed to be unproductive ...

Then hubby comes in from work and discovers our refrig/freezer isn't cool -- the milk had curdled (I skipped breakfast yesterday and was on the road with the little car crisis that I didn't eat anything out of the refrig and hadn't noticed). He decided to pull out the appliance and clean the coils hoping that was the problem.

Nope. At 5 AM when he left for work this morning he woke me up and said "you need to go refrigerator shopping today." So much for catching up from missing a day of quilting yesterday!

So on with my mission. Not an easy task having to buy under pressure, not only that but to be limited in my selection due to (1) needing white to match the rest of the appliances and (2) needing to be a certain size since the current refrig/freezer is recessed in the wall and there is NO other place in the kitchen to put an appliance. Undaunted, I get my trusty measuring tape that once belonged to the master craftsman I called daddy and measure my current appliance as well as measure the opening or what I've fondly called today "the hole". And yes, being the daughter of a master craftsman I do know how to properly measure (grin). By the way, because we inherited this machine with the house we have no idea of its age and decided we didn't want to invest in repairs.

So armed with a little notebook with my dimensions I set out on my quest. I decided my shopping options included Conn's Appliance, Fry's Electronics, Sear's Appliance, Best Buy, Lowe's and Home Depot -- all within a 20 mile radius (how blessed am I to have such choices!!).

Or so I thought. Refrigerators come in so many shapes and sizes now days, not to mention price ranges -- but I was very very limited in finding one that was short enough to fit into the HOLE. I guess when they remodeled this house who knows how many years before we purchased it that refrigs were shorter back then. Oh my.

I'll spare you all the details of my search. But I did narrow it down to two appliances, one at Best Buy and one at Lowe's, who thankfully were near each other as I did make several return trips to make sure of my purchase. The sale price was the same, the difference was between top freezer or bottom freezer as we had previously decided we did not want side by side any more. Of course I'm text messaging hubby at work and on the phone more than once with my sister and my mother who have much more experience in this department than I do.

We (my sister and I) decided on the bottom freezer...several reasons actually - one being that was my hubbies preference if I could find one, two because I liked opening the refrig door to have all my most used items at eye level, and three because it was the best buy (no pun intended because I did purchase from Best Buy). I was able to purchase the floor model on clearance for almost half price of an untouched one because it was last year's model! Praise the Lord! The other one's retail value wasn't as high so I sorta felt like I got a better appliance for my money. Being the floor model I don't care that it will need a little elbow grease to get the smudged hand prints off the handle. Give it a week or two at my house and it will look like that anyway (grin). And I didn't care that it didn't have an ice maker (could have added one) because we make our ice from distilled water anyway -- our local water really needs a filter and we don't have that, so our current freezer had the ice maker turned off anyway. Other than that, it's a nice modern refrig/freezer combo that I think will look good in my kitchen and more importantly, do it's job of keeping things cold!

I am really praising the Lord that we were able to have such a nice refrig for an affordable price, especially since we hadn't budgeted for this and had to purchase under the gun. Only negative is they can't deliver until Saturday....no problem, just told hubby he has to take me out for dinner (tee hee) somehow I can always manage a dinner out!

I guess the next day and a half I'll be eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches because that doesn't need to be kept cool. I'll just pretend like I'm camping -- until tomorrow night's dinner of course!

So yep, there's been a few bumps in the road lately, but golly, that's life. Where would a rambler be if there wasn't a little drama every now and then.

Whew, shopping takes a lot outa a gal...more later!