Yeah, I heard that Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were collapsing, and the Feds had to step in, and the housing market is still crashing. There's still a war in Iraq, and some other war thing in Afghanistan, and the price of oil is still on a general upward trend. Folks tell us that the globe is warming up and it's going to cause the most populated regions in the world to go underwater, and there's hints of a worldwide tuberculosis plague starting in the next few years.

But none of that matters, because Ethel has a new washer and dryer!

                     


Her old washer and dryer were starting to die - I can't really tell you how old they were, because they were in the Park City house when we moved in there (and they were newer at that time than the ones we brought with us, so we got rid of the old ones and kept the new ones). That was over ten years ago when we aquired them, and they were already used for some time (however, they were verrah nass (that's "very nice" with a French accent) because, just like everything else in that house, they were top-of-the-line) so I would estimate their age at something around fifteen years.

They were still servicable, but things were going wrong - this or that setting or cycle wouldn't work anymore, and the dryer had started to pick up an infrequent, intermittent squeak that sort of sounded like somebody in the house was walking funny while wearing tennis shoes on tile.

So one morning I was riding back home from my run with my Saturday morning running buddies, and I saw a large moving sale at a big honkin' house on Circle Mountain Road where all of the vehicles are Hummers or Caddies, and I noted that they had several sets of brand new applicance (by "brand new" I mean that they still had the labels and shipping tape on them) and I noticed that one of the sets of applicances was a pretty darn nice washer and dryer - Whirlpool Cabrio models - and I came home, checked the reviews and specs, noted that the price for the pair was well less than the list price for either, and told Ethel to go buy 'em.

So she did.

I'm not sure just how this improved our live, but I'm forced to assume that it has, indeed, done so. We don't seem to be any happier; I'm not able to run any faster, and Lucy is still dumb as a box of bricks. Silas' grades have improved, but it's hard to correlate that to the new appliances (I think that had more to do with the beatings).

But at least I'm not hearing that little squeak, looking down to see if I made that noise, realizing that it was the dryer, and then thinking "I'm going to have to replace those soon". That's not exactly "peace of mind", but it will do until real peace of mind comes along.