The View from Here

Refrigerators

Have you shopped for a refrigerator lately? Well, you might want to be more prepared than I was. This can be your consumer report for the month. Read it carefully and you’ll be ready to hit the appliance aisle at your local Home Depot.

Our eleven-year-old refrigerator has been freezing lettuce and making slush out of lemonade for about six months now. We’re a little slow when it comes to making big purchases. We don’t like to give up on something unless we really have to, so we tried several adjustments to the refrigerator’s dials, hoping the problem would go away. We changed our buying/eating habits and stopped using the vegetable bin. But last weekend we finally gave in and went shopping.

There are only about a dozen stores in our local area that sell refrigerators. We could drive to the next town or even buy one online, but then we’re looking at huge delivery charges. So we headed to Lowe’s. That’s when the confusion began.

Do you know how many questions a sales person can ask you about something as basic as a refrigerator? What size do you need? Color? Finish? Glass shelves or wire? Stationary door shelves or adjustable? Ice maker? Water in the door? Water purifier?  Freezer at the top or on the bottom? Side by side, French doors, or conventional doors? Whew! And it had been so long since we had purchased a refrigerator that I didn’t realize you can now pay as much for one as you would for a used car! Look, I just want a refrigerator to keep lettuce cool, milk cold, and chicken frozen. It doesn’t have to entertain me!

However, even a limited search of the internet will show you that a refrigerator can do just that and more. You can get one with a radio/TV/computer in the door. You can get a temperature control alarm, or a “door ajar” alarm. You can get beverage coolers and sophisticated temperature controls. You can get all kinds of dispensers in the door. You can find two doors, three doors, and something called an “elevator” drawer. Refrigerators can blend into the woodwork or stand out in a variety of gleaming colors and finishes. And all of this for a mere $1,500 to $6, 249! Yes, Jenn Air makes a refrigerator that will cost you over $6,000! Viking makes one for $4,000+. Even Maytag has a $2,000+ model.

After thirty minutes at Lowe’s we went comparison shopping at Sears and a local appliance store. My husband is really into comparison shopping. He’s the “real” shopper in our family. I just fake it. Comparison shopping means more models and features and a confusing difference in prices! I finally started making some notes and suddenly realized there were three things I wanted, or actually didn’t want: no ice maker, no dispensers, no extras. That translated into a plain, 21 cu. ft. “bottom of the line” refrigerator, which we had seen at Lowe’s for $468. Back to where we started!

It arrives tomorrow. Yeah! Fresh salad is only a day away!

Of course I still have to fill ice trays and get my own water.

A little suffering is good for the soul. Later…

            

School's Out

I don’t care what the calendar says about the official first day of summer. When that last school bell rings summer is here! We had a great “last day”. In fact, we had a great “last week”.  This has been a good class and I’m anxious to hear how they perform as first graders.

Time now for some serious gardening. My downtown flowerbeds are looking pretty good, but need a lot more mulch to withstand the summer heat. My home garden is a neglected mess! I’ll be pulling weeds and cleaning up for a month of Sundays. Oh well. I enjoy being outside.

Our dog problem has become much more than a nuisance. I can’t remember mentioning it before, but our neighbor has at least ten dogs. Several of them are pit bull mixes. They are aggressive, destructive and noisy. I know they killed my two cats. I’ve seen them try to kill a stray dog. They chase the horses. They run through my flowers. Well, yesterday a stray dog showed up and is trying to stay on our porch. The neighbor’s dogs started harassing it at sundown and continued off and on until well after 10pm. The stray was afraid to make a run for it. It’s still on the porch this morning. If it is still there when I get home I guess I will have to call the sheriff. We don’t have a dog catcher out here in the country.

I should be getting ready for vacation, but we have had to postpone our trip. We’ve had some scheduling problems that just won’t resolve themselves. It’s my fault. I just plowed ahead and made plans, thinking all along that our problems would resolve themselves and everything would work out. Well, it didn’t. So now we are planning to take a couple of mini-trips and forget about a trip to CA until conditions are right.

We’re going refrigerator shopping next week. Wish us luck! We’ve had problems with the old one for months, but kept putting off getting a new one so we would have more money for vacation. Now that we’ve postponed, we decided to go ahead and get the refrigerator. It seems like nothing lasts anymore. Our old one is only about ten years old. The one I had before was about twenty years old!

Well, that wasn’t very enlightening or exciting, but I’ll get back into the swing of things. After all…school’s out for summer!!!

Computer Withdrawl

Right now Gary and Robert are in the living room laughing at me, because I’m positively giddy about having my computer back again! Let them laugh! This has been such an experience. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed blogging, emailing, writing, researching, etc. until the day everything crashed and I just sat here looking at a “frozen” blue screen. My mind started racing. How much was saved on disk? How much had I written in the previous week that wasn’t on disk? What should I do? How long would it take to fix this? How much would it cost? I spent 40 minutes on the phone with Dell and nothing we tried worked.

I decided to take it to a computer shop on Saturday. Surprise! The shop that had previously cleaned and serviced it for me was no longer open on Saturdays. Nor were the other three shops in town. So we headed to the library, looked up some shops and chose one in Sherman, TX. I figured I could do without the computer for a week…pick it up the next Saturday. No big deal. Well, at the end of the week they informed me that they were “very busy” and hadn’t had time to get to my computer. Ugh! Okay, one more week wouldn’t hurt me. At the end of the week I called and a pleasant young man said, “Oh, thank goodness you called. I’ve been trying to reach you all week!” Well, he had the wrong phone number!!!! He wanted to tell me that the computer would need at least $150 worth of work and he needed my permission and one of my installation disks to complete the job. At that point I’d lost all confidence and told him I’d just pick it up on Saturday. Well, when I got there to pick it up he brought out the WRONG computer!! He was so embarrassed about all the mix-ups he didn’t even charge me the basic service rate.

On Monday I left work early so I could take the computer to the same guys that had worked on it before. They called a couple of days later and said they ran a virus scan, found something, and that seemed to be the end of the problem. Gary picked the computer up Thursday but I didn’t have time to hook it up. Friday I tried, but I was confused by two of the USB cables, so I decided to wait until Saturday and let my son hook it up.

Saturday came, cables all in place…computer would NOT work. I can’t even describe to you how disappointed I was. And frustrated because I don’t have enough technical knowledge to even know what to be angry about. Robert ran a virus scan and found a virus. Got rid of that and everything worked except the internet. He suggested I finish saving data before he tried anything else. I sat here for an hour and a half filling disks. We don’t have a CD burner or memory stick. ( I will be updating soon!!) He worked late into the night and still didn’t have any success.

We went to our friend’s anniversary party this afternoon and when we returned Robert had everything working!!!! He reinstalled software and rebooted stuff and did something with drivers that I don’t understand. I just know I have a brilliant son and I don’t know what I’m going to do when he moves to Arizona next month. I have a feeling there will be lots of long distance phone calls.

As my friend asked today, “When did we start relying on our children?” The answer is…when we started depending on machines that we don’t understand.

Have a great day! With any luck I’ll be posting again soon. 

Problems

I guess you've wondered where I've been. I had a major computer problem and have been off line for a few days. I'm going through withdrawl! Hope you will check back from time to time. I am confident I will be back! The computer is in the shop and I'm posting this at the library. Be patient....I'll try to be.