A House Is Made Of Walls And Beams But A Home Is Built With Love And Dreams Screams: Why I Might Be Pureeing Thanksgiving This Year

Thanksgiving 2011.  Above the snowy tablecloth, heads are bowed in gratitude.  One by one, each person speaks a blessing--something for which he or she is thankful this holiday.  It is Nance's turn next.  She lifts her head; her eyes become misty and her lip trembles slightly.  Her hand reaches for a piece of cutlery.  "I...I...I am grateful that my house has not made me kill myself.  Yet."

Why is it that Things go wrong and fall apart in bunches?  Consider:

Monday afternoon, the refrigerator repairman is in my kitchen on his cellphone and my guts are in a knot.  Sunday night, after over two hours of buzzing in two-minute intervals, my side-by-side gave up. So, Rick and I loaded up all our chilly comestibles into laundry baskets and trucked everything to the tiny basement fridge and crammed it in. When I brought home the turkey, I had to use brute force to get it in there.  Mr. Repairman has now made two trips to his truck, each time carrying a wire-sprouting thingamajig.  More on that later.

Earlier this month, my garage door opener...didn't.  I needed to go someplace, pushed our inside button and...nothing. So, I did what everyone would do in this situation.  I pushed it eleventy million times really, really hard and screamed the Eff Word.  Hard to believe, but this did not work.  "Oh, did you simply take your key and go in via the service door?" you may be asking calmly and rationally.  And I would merely answer you with my teeth gritted in kind, "Oh, would that be the service door blocked by Sam's loveseat, some sheet metal, a fishing rod, a bag of fertilizer, and a basket painted with cow spots?  Certainly."  And then, because I am too short and too weak to first reach the lever and then try to pull it hard enough to open the non-functioning door after climbing over all that crap, I found my way to my car and used the button inside of it.  IN THE PITCH-DARK.  BECAUSE...

The electricity in the garage is inexplicably not working either, so there were no lights working inside when the service door blew shut.  That would explain why the pump on the pond also stopped aerating the water, resulting in a fishkill.  Goodbye, Johnny Depp, who we raised from an egg, and Garbo. I will miss you both. Sigh.

Monday, I was also waiting for the chimney sweep. Our fireplace, instead of making our house a toasty, inviting space worthy of a Christmas card, instead renders it a horrific scene worthy of a fire safety film. It belches smoke into the living room as if hoping to turn us all into hams and bacon. At 9:30 he appeared and, for some reason, simply stood on the porch. Period. Then I realized:  he had been ringing the doorbell for a while. The doorbell that had, until today apparently, worked just fine. 

What is happening?  In the past six weeks alone, my computer has refused to acknowledge even a casual relationship with my printer, my car battery completely died, the dual zone wine refrigerator capriciously becomes single zone, and I'm not sure, but I think my crockpot is plotting against me for Christmas Eve.

So, back to The Refrigerator Issue.  But you already know that he didn't have the part on his truck--they never, ever, ever do. And even when The Part comes Tuesday, there's no guarantee that it will fix the problem--something about a relay and a locked-up compressor--but, as Repairman Tim said, it's worth a shot, but, hey! Eight years is what you can expect to get out of refrigerators these days anyway, so it's about right. WHAT?! I wanted to beat someone up! This fridge is a wuss, an eleven hundred dollar, stainless steel, ice and water in the door WUSS.  Its teeny little almond-colored predecessor in the basement is twice its age, half its price, no-frills, and still going strong. WHAT A LOT OF FUCKING BULLSHIT.

But what I said was, "Thank you so much for fitting me in today and tomorrow. I really, really appreciate it.  See you tomorrow."  And then Rick and I went to the appliance store last night to pick out a possible replacement and get the final slot on the delivery list for Tuesday.  Because the way things have been going, we don't want to take any chances.