It’s amazing how much an appliance becomes part of your life yet you have no idea how much you miss it until it’s gone or broken.  Our microwave broke down last month and the time from when it died to the time we had a new one installed was the longest week on earth.  The only thing I can compare it to is how you take swallowing for granted until you actually get a sore throat.  With every swallow and gulp during that time, you’re reminded how often that bodily function is carried out each day.  You do everything you can to get your throat back to its normal state so it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to swallow razor blades.

Here’s a perfect example of how spoiled we’ve become.  Back in the “olden days” when Ally was a baby a mere 4 years ago, we would scrub her bottles clean and then boil them in a pot on the stove.  Once Katie came into the picture this summer, there was a newfangled apparatus we found that allowed you to steam your bottles in two minutes time by placing it in the microwave.  This cut out the step of having to heat a pot of water to boiling temps, carefully place and remove the bottle items, and then set the pieces out to dry.  All those steps were eliminated with this microwaveable container where all you do is add seven ounces of water, seal it, and place it into the microwave.  The problem is that your microwave has to actually work for all this to happen!

Since we have an over-the-range microwave, we couldn’t just simply buy a freestanding one to replace it that day.  We had to shop around and then schedule an installation day and pretend to live in the 1950s until the damn thing was installed again.  I daresay I was almost as happy as the day my high definition TV was delivered to our home.  It wasn’t just the bottle steaming device that we missed.  How many of you can honestly say you’ve had non-microwaved popcorn in your house the past 15 years?

While I’m on the Dead Appliances topic, I’ll swear our home appliances all made a mass suicide pact.  Within a week after the microwave went to purgatory, the washer and dryer decided that they too would like to add to our financial burden by also dying after 7 years of indentured servitude.  What really blows about all of this is that the two appliances we actually WANT dead, the dishwasher and refrigerator, will continue to work for as long as we’re at this house.  The dishwasher’s noise is only a few decibels below what you’d experience standing on an airport tarmac and the refrigerator was designed by an engineer at GE intent on bringing down the company with inferior products.