Rose's Cantina

Hello. You there . Did you miss me? I've been a bit busy this past week buying food, then making it the same day. Seriously, I'm not trying to be French. I'm trying to avoid death via a lethal consumption of salmonella and E Coli, courtesy of our homemade fridge. It's called a cooler. That's right, a cooler. The thing you keep beer in, except we're now keeping milk in it and cooling it with frozen beer bottles. We're also spending valuable video game time rescuing the cheese and tortillas from what must seem to them to be the bottom of the Titanic. Monterey Jack, come back! It's been two weeks since we lost our fridge. The only thing that saved us was one of those apartment sized freezers that used to store frozen cherries. It's now our lifeline. It's also been about two weeks since that piece of shit neighbor Kenny seized our lawnmower and more than three months since our vacuum cleaner lost its battle with Finnigan's hair. I was...

As I watched the junk guy take my KitchenAid fridge away yesterday, I went to my happy place to see if I learned anything from my experience with appliance ownership. As you may know, my seven-year-old fridge bit the dust on the weekend. It was taken to wherever dead fridges go, somewhere perhaps like the desolate world of Walle where the 30-year-old Amana beer fridge lies in a heap next to the KitchenAid, an old man sitting next to a kid who took crack one too many times. It's so depressing to think about the appliance cemetery because fridges like ours can't even be refurbished. They'll just lay there until the planet explodes from cow farts and freons. My intuition tells me that the geniuses who get rich selling appliances have finally figured out that they can't make money selling fridges to people who keep them for 30 years so they install innards that are designed to become obsolete in a few years, just like Pontiac Sunfires. After I wrote that post, I re...

I suppose it's a lesson in modern consumerism. Let's recap. Our $2,200 KitchenAid refrigerator died on us on the weekend after only seven years. The repair guy, who was nice enough to come by yesterday, said there was nothing we could do. The compressor was kaput. So after spending a few hours crying, we called the junk guy who was scheduled to come to our house this morning. Scott wrestled the beast out of the house yesterday where it sat in a monsoon. And Nick wrecked his back helping out. Then we resurrected an old fridge in the garage to get us through our fridge crisis until we could afford a new one. Meanwhile, I wrote a blog, as I always do when something comes crashing down in my life. One of my Facebook friends reposted my blog on the KitchenAid Facebook site and someone from social media contacted me saying someone from KitchenAid would be in touch today. Which they were. A woman named Theresa called Scott, saying she was from Whirlpool, and Scott called b...