A Cold Cup of Tea

We have a giant retro microwave that came with all the nice donated furniture (thanks Deb!) when we moved into this house. It takes two people to lift this sucker. Also, it's shy. It's completely silent - no beeps, so you have to keep an eye on it or else you'll wander away and forget that you put something in to heat up, because it doesn't tell you when it's done. It has its quirks, but we kept it, figuring we could use our money on other things as long as the microwave actually worked.


Lately it's been acting a bit strange. It's been slowly taking longer and longer to heat things up, to the point where a plate of rice now takes upwards of six minutes. Then, two days ago, I tried to re-heat a cold cup of tea and the microwave started for a half a second, and then lost all power for a second or so. Hmm. I started it again and it lost all power again, only this time it didn't come back. I immediately tried turning on the range hood light because I know they're on the same circuit, and that didn't come on either. Crap!

I put on my winter boots, slogged through the snow to the door to the basement, and went down to have a peek at the breakers. Nothing was awry so I gave a little push on all the breaker switches with my finger just to make sure, and went back outside and into the civilized part of the house again.

The microwave had power once more -- was it something I did? I'll never know. I turned it on for a third time and it got a little scary. It whirred to life, made a slow little dying noise as the interior light dimmed, and the swooped back to full power and started making grumbly noises as it heated my tea.

I don't like scary noises coming out of my radiation-spewing appliances, nor do I like one appliance to drain all the power from the others. It's time for the silent and ancient microwave to be retired.

After Mark was done working we decided to go microwave shopping. There is one store that sells microwaves in town here - Home Hardware. It turns out that Home Hardware only had one microwave for sale, and it was a dubious cheap-looking thing called "Goldstar 500" or some similar name.

No thanks.

Let's start a new thread in the story. Neville the foster cat arrived in our house a few weeks ago nursing the tail end of a kitty cold. His cold has come back and we've needed to re-start his medication. The problem is, the vet in the neighbouring town only had a little bit of the medicine so we need to drive 40 kilometres to the next nearest big town to get more medicine now that it has been prepared for us.

There was a snowstorm today so we couldn't make it to the other vet. We also haven't been able to get to any sort of store that sells microwaves with recognizable brand names. This is the new reality for us: we just can't have everything instantly. This is how rural life works! I see it as a good thing. If we want to buy new crap, we have to really want it because it takes prior planning to make most purchases when you live this far from any sort of concentration of stores. There are no spur-of-the-moment purchases. We don't waste money constantly on Indian food and sushi any more either because there is none.

The weather is not supposed to be great again tomorrow, so I really don't know when we'll be able to get the medicine and microwave.

I like rural living though, and we'll get our stuff sooner or later. Would you rather be a city mouse or a country mouse?