Another (and Another) One Bites the Dust

Remember when you were a little kid and you overheard your mom worrying about money? Oh, maybe that was just me. I used to hear my mom and dad discussing our finances, usually when the finances had migrated north for the summer. And the statement I heard more than any other as I was growing up was, "Don't make me turn this car around!" No wait, that was the second-most overheard statement. The statement I heard most was, "If it's not one thing it's another." And since becoming a homeowner, I have discovered that statement to have quite the ring of truth to it, except it's more like a car alarm!

Sunday afternoon Peyton and I had gone to run errands while Randy and Sawyer took Tyler and Darcy to chorus practice (they're participating in Leadership Training for Christ this spring--yay!). We were gone several hours so everybody beat us home, and when we walked in the door we were met by Tyler, who gravely informed me that the Xbox had given up the ghost, as evidenced by the smoke and flames that shot out of the cord when he plugged in the box. Wow, somebody up there must like me! Oh, I mean, aww, that's too bad, kids.

Surprisingly, Tyler took the loss pretty well, perhaps because the Xbox simply needs a new cord and it'll be as good as, well, the "slightly used" condition that it was in when we bought it. For my part, I am enjoying the silence while I am able.

What's really got me seriously bummed is the realization that a slightly bigger ticket item of ours croaked Sunday. At least I think that's what it did. Our upright freezer that is used to store oversized items or multiples (think ten loaves of bread, those massive packages of chicken breasts from Sam's, etc.) suddenly and inexplicably stopped cooling. And this realization came at about 9:00 Sunday night when I went out to the freezer for a loaf of hard-as-a-rock, frozen solid bread and came back with a loaf of soft, squishy-as-melted-ice-cream bread.

I immediately alerted Randy to the problem and he poked and prodded the freezer like a doctor examining his patient, only to come back to me with a grim prognosis, very grim indeed. So now we have a completely useless upright freezer in our garage, which goes nicely with our limping-along-on-its-last-leg fridge/freezer in our kitchen which is so near death you can practically hear it wheezing. The ice maker refuses to give us any output--perhaps it had its feelings hurt by all those bags of Sonic ice.

Because, I mean really, it's Sonic. I'm just sayin'.