mental note to self

You know how they say you pay for what you get? And you get what you pay for? This apparently applies to appliances. This morning we were stuck at home with the FOURTH (fruitless) repair visit for our refrigerator. Our huge, nice, posh, glamorous, nearly brand-new refrigerator, the one that we would never have been able to afford if we hadn't bought it at the Sears Scratch and Dent store. A 25-cubic foot Whirlpool fridge for under a grand? Lucky us! Right?

Ugh. Today we had the pleasure of being informed by the repairman that the replacement part that we'd received (and had to wait a week to have installed) was unnecessary and not going to fix our problem. We also got to listen to him get in a bitch-fight with the tech support on his speaker phone. Then he called his supervisor to rat out the other combatant in the verbal squabble. Charming. He (and the tech support, and the supervisor) was stumped by our fridge's inability to maintain a proper temperature, and decided to blame the problem on faulty wiring in our electrical outlet. This is entirely likely, since there has yet to be an example of UNfaulty wiring in this house, other than the new outlets installed by my dad, but are you telling me that it took the FOURTH VISIT before someone checked the outlet? So now we have to bring in an electrician, have the outlet repaired (or have it confirmed that the outlet isn't the problem) and then sit tight for another two weeks until our next service appointment. Awesome.

The good news is, as with all the other visits, the fridge is plenty cold and making ice like a champ since they reset all the operations. It will probably work for another week or so and then start warming up. We threw away two garbage bags' worth of food out of the freezer this morning (last summer's peaches, sad). I dearly, sincerely wish we'd just not bothered with the bargain-hunting and just bought a perfectly fine appliance from Home Depot for the same price and infinitely less trouble. Lesson learned.

it's been a long time since my ovaries have twinged with this kind of regularity...

Please. Please. Just watch the whole thing.



Oh, and remember last summer, when I asked you for some good karmic juju, and you did your best but the thing I was wishing for didn't pan out? Well, this time, multiply that times ten thousand, and please throw me some mental good-luck love this week. I'll make every one of you some fudge if this comes through. A Delaney's-Good-Luck-Fudge-of-the-Month subscription, how does that sound?

important ways in which I am, generally, an asshole

I am a very generous person. I said yesterday, in reference to Badness' birthday present, finding the perfect present for someone is better than getting presents myself. I think that at least 40% of my love of food is associated with sharing food. I bake for other people, I like to hand someone a bite of something sweet and see their faces bliss out. I love hosting, I love providing food.

But when you ask me, "Ooh, that looks good, can I have some of that?" before I have offered it to you, I am guaranteed to respond with a very stiff, "oh. I guess." Even if it is something I brought to the office with the purpose of sharing it. Because I'm a jerk and I like being able to PRESENT something, and because I hate moochers, even when I am regularly a mooch myself. And I guess, like the great and powerful Lucille Bluth, I get off on being withholding.

And while I'm on confessions, and this is definitely related to my issues with sharing, here is another way I'm an asshole, and particularly my major flaw as a manager: I play favorites. I mean, of course I do. Everybody does, right? This was, obviously, most significant at Hatch. I worked with my sisters most of the time, and of course they were my favorites. But they were also really, really good employees, some of the best during my tenure. If they had been slacks, would I have still favored them? Probably. It was worst with interns. I would invite the hip, funny interns to come out to dinner with us, but not the lame ones who talked too much. That's terrible, right? And I'd be sure the ones I liked got the jobs they wanted, at least part of the time.

Just one more reason for me to not have children. Seriously.

File Under: Incidents my Mother might misinterpret as a cry for help

Note to self: Whilst bringing two cups of pomegranate juice to a boil (with the further intent of reducing the heat, allowing to simmer until reduced to 1/2 cup), DO NOT leave your favorite (and expensive) Le Creuset pot over high heat and then wander into the living room and get drawn into the new CW drama Gossip Girl, a guilty dirty teenager mess (it's like the OC in Manhattan).

IF you were to do that, probably you would look up twenty minutes later to a house filled with smoke and all the animals looking at you like you were perhaps trying to poison them. You might dash through the house followed by a string of expletives that would do your paternal grandmother proud. You would likely spend the next hour attempting to force smoke out every open door and window available, and performing desperate rescue attempts on your precious Le Creuset that involve a carefully crafted paste of Oxyclean and muttered prayers to various deities.

And you probably wouldn't admit to ANYONE that, in fact, not two hours earlier, you might have been called to the kitchen by the smell of smoke, only to discover that all the water in the pan under the artichoke steamer had boiled away, an unfortunate occurrence that happens EVERY SINGLE TIME you attempt to make artichokes lately.

So, sure, that's right. I tried to burn the house down. Twice. Tonight.