And the clock is back to zero

I have made no progress for several weeks on, I don't know, anything. I decide to do something and then soon enough change my mind and end up doing something entirely different or nothing at all.

After having a really bad day a while back that did not quite come out of nowhere, I've had most of an okay week and even a few days that were mostly pleasant. I begin to tell myself that maybe things are not that bad. But things are going to get that bad soon enough, financially speaking anyway, and I should deal with this and that and the other thing first. And then, of course, I do nothing. Now that there are times when I am not literally too depressed to do anything, I find that I am often too tired to do anything, and of course right now it is too hot to do anything outside and sometimes inside.

Though we did plan ahead a bit and go to the Home Depot and get foam and such, somehow Sunday came and went without our having fixed the problem of properly installing the air conditioner in the window, so there is still this gap around it. Monday also came and went without anything being done about it, and nothing will get done about it today either. Tomorrow I am busy, and it is not the sort of thing he can do by himself tomorrow any more than I can get the job done today without him. So it might get done Thursday, maybe.

Other than getting nothing done and the temperature getting four degrees over a hundred and all of that, I have almost had a pleasant few days. And as I drift off to sleep thinking that things are not that bad at the moment, I have a total change of heart in the middle of the night. For some reason, my husband got up to adjust the air conditioner. He knows that I've already set it to the maximum that I can stand, and I can't imagine that he wanted it warmer, so really he had no business doing that in the first place. But he did it anyway, only he somehow managed to screw up and turn the thing to fan only, and we woke up a few hours later to a very unpleasant warm room. So the air conditioner was turned back on. It was hot for a long time while the air conditioner tried to cool the room down again, and then about the time that it was cool again it started to get too cold for me to sleep comfortably, but not cold enough for me to really wake up and to go and deal with the problem myself.

Then when I finally do get back to sleep I have this terrible dream that we have gone and melted the polar ice caps or some damned thing. The world was coming to an end and everyone was going to die. Really, everyone was going to die, there was no doubt about it in anyone's mind. There was a lot of moving about to avert one thing or another, but then at some point everyone knows that everyone is going to get it eventually anyway, so there's really no point in all of this stuff that everyone was trying to do. And if literally everyone is going to die anyway, one might as well go home and be reasonable comfortable for a bit before that. I should like to see my mother and all of that. So we head for home and almost get there, when we have some difficulty with something, and we decide not to travel that last little bit if we can't contact my mother. And then my husband and I get separated and it all gets very scary, even though other than that nothing really bad is happening. So that last bit of everything being relatively normal is wasted while we are either trying to find each other or trying to contact other family. And then we do find each other, but before we figure out what are we supposed to do now, I wake up.

Not the most pleasant way to start the day.

Now real life rears its ugly head. Someone has died. Not someone in my immediate family, but someone close enough that I would want to go to the funeral. I'm the grown up now, and while I should have had to deal with this sort of thing for the last twenty years or so, somehow with the business travel and all I haven't gone to many funerals until maybe the last five years or so. I guess that I'm getting used to them. They're not all bad. You do get to see people that you don't normally see.

Anyway, I guess that my mother wasn't entirely happy with whatever I wore to Dad's funeral. At some point after that, we were at a mall and she said that she didn't like my black clothes (which is not a surprise as she has been saying that for about twenty years), and that she should buy me a nice black dress, just in case I had to go to a funeral or something. So she bought me a dress, and then like a week later, somebody died. And then a month or two later, someone else died. I ended up wearing the dress a bit more than I liked. But I did at least have the dress, and if and when I did have to go to a funeral, I did not have to think about what to wear.

The last funeral I went to was a bit after Easter, and I wore the dress. And I think that I was a bit overdressed. But there were a lot of people at the funeral wearing all kinds of things, so it wasn't too weird. But still, I do now wonder if maybe there isn't something a bit rude about being better dressed at a funeral than other people in general and the immediate family in particular. Further more, the funeral is to be held in the middle of nowhere, and I expect the people are even less likely to be dressed up out there than they might be around here. And then there is the damned 100+ degree weather, which is not the ideal time to wear my finest black dress. And I'm afraid that I hadn't given it much thought until this morning, when my mother called to remind me of the time and confirm that I would be riding with them, etc.... And I had the time so stuck in my mind that I totally forgot about the drive time to get to the middle of nowhere, so I'll need to wear something that I won't mind having on that long, and I'd forgotten that I'd actually have to get up early to get ready. I'll have to set my alarm clock and everything.

So now I don't really know what I'll wear to the funeral. I guess I'll be spending some time today trying on clothes and such. Not my favorite thing to do at the moment, but it is necessary and I need to quit whining about it and get on with it.

I am already tired and want to forget the whole thing and go back to bed. There is at least a reason for feeling so tired today, but it's not really enough of an excuse to actually do that.

The $600 refrigerator costs $912.65

Well, we had this little trip just before New Year's, and I went to the club New Year's Eve party after that, but except for that it hasn't been that great around here. For one thing we had this fight. The fight didn't last long. Not cause we decided to kiss and make up, but just because I don't care enough to keep fighting. There's no point in fighting, because he just doesn't get it. It's not the kind of fight where anything gets resolved. Nobody wins the fight. Nothing get accomplished. I tell him that there's a problem and how I feel and what needs to be done about it. And he tells me that there's nothing to be done. This is like two minutes after I've just got through telling him what can be done. And then he tells me that everything is going to be okay, cause he hasn't heard a word that I've said.

Whatever.

While that sort of thing goes on, the rest of life still happens. After coming home from the New Year's Eve party, I put some things away, and I put some stuff from the party into the refrigerator. And I was dimly aware that the refrigerator light wasn't on. Well, once in a while you have to put a new bulb in the refrigerator. But it doesn't have to be done in the middle of the night, and I'm sure that there's no place to get a replacement bulb at that time anyway, so I went to bed.

The next day it occurred to me that it wasn't just the light-bulb that had gone out. The refrigerator was silent. A good working frig doesn't make a lot of noise, but it does sort of make a slight humming sound. There was no humming sound. This is a bad sign.

After doing a little bit of math I figured out that we've probably had the frig for more than fifteen years, and we should have known that it soon would be time to get a new one anyway. But somehow, it was a surprise.

Luckily, New Year's Day is just another day for most stores, so we were off to the mall.

I don't really want an ice maker and all of that stuff. Besides, the person who lived here before us didn't have all that stuff, so the kitchen isn't set up for that. And we don't want to pay anyone to do fix that now. So we were just shopping for a plain ordinary frig with no ice maker and no water dispenser on the door or anything like that. I had an idea that it would cost somewhere around five or six hundred dollars, though it's been a while since I've paid attention to such things, so I wasn't sure.

So we go to Sears, and there's a black one for about five hundred fifty. And I suddenly think it would be cool to have a black refrigerator, though the idea had never seriously occurred to me before. So I try not to look much at that particular frig, cause I'm afraid that I'll pick that one just because it's black.

Well, it turns out that a lot of them have the option of black. Black costs like an extra twenty dollars, which is not too bad. Some of them also have the option of stainless steel, which my husband liked, but stainless steel is an extra hundred or even two hundred. So we decided not to get anything stainless steel.

So we're looking at the refrigerators, and mostly, they all just look like refrigerators. We stand there and try to figure out why two refrigerators that look almost the same have different prices. At first we thought that some of the price difference was because of the stainless steel or the different colors, but then you read the labels and find out that the price on the refrigerator is just for a white refrigerator, even if the particular frig you are looking at is another color or stainless steel. Getting a different color or stainless steel is almost always an extra charge. And usually the ice maker is also an extra charge, so that isn't it either.

We finally start to figure it all out. Two refrigerators that are the same size and look almost identical from the outside look slightly different on the inside. There may be a price difference of fifty dollars or a hundred dollars or perhaps even two hundred dollars because one has more lights or more adjustable shelves or both.

Okay, now that we've figured that out, I'm mostly looking at four of them that are priced between $450 and $600. And I don't even have to have those. There's one that seems a bit smaller for $429, and there are much smaller ones for even less that I would take if my husband says we really can't afford the ones that I'm looking at. But mainly, he's looking at the one on sale for $600. It's just over 20 cubic feet, and it's just like the one next to it for $500, except that most of the shelves are adjustable, and it has a light in the freezer part.

Are more adjustable shelves worth an extra hundred dollars?

Probably.

Could we pay the extra twenty dollars and get it in black?

Sure, why not? If we're going to spend $600 anyway we might as well spend $620 if you really like it that much better.

Okay.

Now I've noticed some little prices inside of the refrigerators, and I'm not sure, but I think they're the prices of the service contracts. So I think that we should decide whether or not we want a service contract before we talk to a salesperson. Probably, we should have discussed this before we ever went to the mall. If you don't firmly decide you do not want to purchase a service contract before the salesperson mentions it, then you usually end up buying one.

But right then a salesperson appears, and my husband asks if they have this model available in black. So the salesperson goes off to see if they have any in the store that we could have tomorrow, or if not there's probably one in the warehouse that we can have the day after tomorrow.

So we don't really discuss the service contract before the salesperson comes back, and we end up paying another $150 for a three year contract. And then there is sales tax and delivery fees and another ten dollars to take away the old frig. So the refrigerator that was on sale for $600 dollars ends up costing just over nine hundred, with twenty dollars of that being because I suddenly got the silly idea that I wanted a black refrigerator. Still, that is just twenty dollars of it. I guess we would have spent almost nine hundred anyway if we'd just got the white one.

It was a great relief to get that part of it over with. We walked around the mall for a bit and then went home.

The next day I figured out that I would have to move a piece of furniture that was right next to the door. If the door is open all the way and actually touching the wall, the door opening is about 31 inches wide. I'm guessing that is a standard door size. While this piece of furniture is next to the door and prevents the door from being opened like that, the door itself makes the usable width of the doorway opening somewhat smaller by about an inch and a half. The refrigerators mostly seem to come in sizes that are either 31 inches wide or 31 inches deep and only barely squeeze through the doorway if the doorway is completely open and clear of any obstructions, including that bit of the door itself that is normally in the doorway when the door is open to its normal ninety degree angle to the wall.

Just before all of this had happened, I'd decided that it was a good time to clean out the kitchen cabinets, and had removed everything from about half of the cabinets and put the items on the floor. I hadn't finished with that project yet, so I left the items on the floor.

We got a call to confirm that we were expecting a delivery and given a two hour window during which one of us had to be there to accept delivery of the refrigerator. It then occurred to me that while I'd just assume that most of the stuff in the old frig be thrown away, I should probably do that myself in the morning just before the delivery. The old frig would be too heavy to move if I left the spoiled fruit and a bunch of half empty bottles inside.

So I threw away a bunch of stuff, and I put a bunch more stuff like bottles of mustard and such on the floor. Does mustard spoil? I don't know. I thought maybe if I got some of the stuff into the new frig soon that maybe it would be okay. But I didn't clean the frig itself like I usually would if I were throwing out stuff like that. I don't think that I need to clean something that's about to be hauled away.

The delivery came at the late end of the two hour window. And then there was a lot of drama trying to get the old frig out and the new one in. I'd gotten the main door to open all the way and touch the wall, but I'd forgotten that I couldn't do the same with the storm door on the outside because of the little thing that forms the flower bed. So that was annoying.

The whole thing with moving refrigerators is always annoying. But most of us don't have to deal with it very often. If it isn't your job to move refrigerators, you probably only have to deal with it about once every ten years. In the last ten years we've had to now deal with it four times, because in addition to buying this new frig we've moved three times.

Anyway, life would be much easier if they'd make refrigerators just and inch or two smaller. So why are most of the full-size ones 31 inches?

So much for my reasoning that I should not have to clean a refrigerator that is just going to be hauled away. The delivery guy won't take it until I've cleaned it. So it was just left sitting in the driveway. If I'd known that I was expected to clean it I would have done so when I first learned I'd be buying a new one. I'd have cleaned it while it was still indoors. It's not that cold outside, but it is quite uncomfortable to be out with your hands in soapy water. So I do maybe five minutes and then come back in. This takes a long time.

The people that were supposed to come back and get the old frig cannot come for a few more days. So the frig is just sitting in the driveway waiting for an accident to happen.

The old frig was finally hauled away Sunday morning.

The floor of the kitchen is completely covered with either stuff that I took out of the cabinets, or stuff that came out of the old frig. I have decided that mustard and such probably does spoil, and I don't like much of that stuff enough to risk my health. I'd put a few things in an ice chest that is probably okay, but the rest of the food is just being thrown away. I figure that I'll empty a bunch of these bottles and wash them and keep them for craft projects and such, but I only do a few at a time. Soon I'll probably give up on the idea and just throw the rest away. Then I'll be able to walk through the kitchen and deal with the rest of the stuff that goes in the cabinets.

I do like the new frig, but now I'm not sure what made me suddenly want a black one. The washing machine and stove are both white. Even the microwave is white. So it doesn't match the other appliances. And those were all bought in the last few years and are not going to be replaced anytime soon. I have this idea that I'm either going to cover the frig with my husband's black and white photos or maybe put a bunch of chili pepper magnets on it. But that's all a bit silly isn't it? And it's hardly worth the effort seeing how rarely I find time to actually do anything in the kitchen. I should worry more about putting food in the frig rather than waste time thinking how the outside of the frig looks.

Today's planned post has been lost

Well, most of it anyway. I had been saving this particular thing, and now I can't seem to find it. Rather than try to rewrite the whole thing right now, I'll take it as a sign that it wasn't meant to be posted today, and I'll just wait.

And the only other one that I had prepared...well, it just seems a bit soon for that.

Now for the nonsense that seems to fill everyone else's blogs. I didn't get much done today...blah, blah, blah...

Well, the one thing I did get done wasn't as good as I thought. I bought some fabric to make this curtain, but now I see that it just won't do at all. I suppose it will be okay, but it doesn't match up with the other stuff as well as I thought. Now that I've got it in the room, it just looks too bright.
Which brings me back to my usual preference for everything being black. I like black in and of itself. I just like the way it looks. But right now I'm thinking that black is just easier to deal with in general. I mean, if you have something that has say black and orange or maybe peach in it, and you go out looking for stuff to match it you have an easier time with the black than with the orange or peach. The orange or peach stuff looks right, but then it turns out to be a little bit too much on the reddish side or a little too much on the yellowish side, or it's a bit to light or a bit too dark. Black, on the other hand, is pretty much just black. Black is black until it fades enough that it's gray, and then the gray stuff still goes well with the black stuff, so it might still work. And any other solid color goes good with black. So if you have a bunch of black stuff and then you throw in something red, it looks good. And then if you get tired of the red and want something totally different you can get rid of the red and replace it with blue, and the black will still look good with the blue. And probably you don't even have to get rid of the red, cause the black will look good with the red and the blue and possibly a few other colors at the same time.

For a while I had an almost exclusively black wardrobe. In some ways it made life simpler. Most of the laundry could all be done together. Black pants, black shirt, and black socks can all be washed together; no sorting. And I really like the way black clothes look. And if you can get your clothes on without getting deodorant on any of it, you don't have much like that to worry about the rest of the day. If you spill a bit off soda or accidentally sit on a bench where there's a coffee ring, a little water takes care of everything when you're wearing all black. Otherwise, unless the soda or coffee and the clothing are the same color, you either look bad for the rest of the day, change into spare clothes that you brought just in case something like that happened, or run to the nearest drug store to find out if the Tide pens work like in the commercials.

The black clothes made some people think that I was depressed or needing to make some sort of statement. The only statement I was making was that I liked what I was wearing. And while I don't think if myself as in with the rest of the girls who really like to shop, I must admit that I'm rarely depressed when I'm buying clothes. I didn't go to the mall and pick up something black and say "I'm so depressed, and this looks just like I feel."

I don't get it. Tons of people go to Victoria's secret and ask for something black, and no one thinks that they're depressed.

The black clothing has caused a few other comical moments:
"Dear, have you seen my black sweater?"
"What does it look like?"
"It's black."
"Is this it?"
"No, it has buttons on the front."
"Is this it?"
"No, the other one."
"In that case, no, I haven't seen it. Sorry Dear."