It is challenging, but not impossible to control the world from a supine position on my couch . . .

I hinted this week that I’ve been under the weather, but I was all me meh about the details because I’m bored of the weird medical afflictions that have plagued me from head to toe lately my whole life. However, yesterday’s events were like a Seinfeld episode in which a bunch of seemingly random events come slamming together at the end, and I mean slam in the poetic sense.

Suburban Correspondent’s KitchenAid dishwasher went on the fritz this week and she wrote a little poem about it. I happen to have the same model dishwasher pictured in her post, so I left a little poem about that in her comment section, and followed it up later with a suggestion that she host an appliance poetry slam, which she did. Apparently now there is also voting for the best appliance poems over at her (newly redesigned and quite lovely, by the way) very funny blog, so take a moment and go check it out and vote for me, k? I don’t even know if there are prizes, but I want to win anyway, and if you make it through to the end of this post, I’m quite certain I can earn your pity vote because it turns out in a twist of fate that I have actual KitchenAid applicance woes of my own now.

To keep it short because eeeew who wants the TMI anyway and no hot doctors were involved, I started having some, uh, issues having to do with my, uh, female organs (TMI, ack!) and had surgery on Tuesday morning to remove something that didn’t belong up there (TMI, ack!) and was causing pain and heavy bleeding (TMI, ack!). Once again, I'm waiting for lab results, but my last pap smear (TMI, ack!) in April was good, so all guesses are that everything is fine.

Meanwhile . . . after going bat-shit crazy from being under the weather and on the couch forfrickingever, I got the brilliant idea that I would suck it up and go to the grocery store two days post-op to lay in supplies for the coming weeks. I figured it would be one trip to the store and then back home to put my feet up all weekend long, while Laura fetched me things and Tom grilled our dinners. Laura said she’d push the cart and carry in all of the groceries, which was awesome because Laura hates to go shopping. As an aside, Laura is bending over backwards these days to do anything to demonstrate how responsible she can be so she can have a cell phone like “every other kid in her class.” (I’ve opportunistically extorted hours of uncomplaining piano practice, household chores, personal grooming, pleasant attitude, etc. in the last few weeks. I can pretty much get Laura to do whatever I want if I just mention the words cell phone . . . And, by the way, no promises whatsoever about actually buying any cell phone have been made during said moments of extortion.)

So I bought almost $500 worth of stuff (including a liver/colon detox kit because of all of the Girl Scout cookies I've consumed since March drugs I ingested after surgery), and tons of organic meat and other frozen foods so I'd have stuff to crockpot and for Tom to BBQ in the coming weeks. I bought beef. I bought chicken. I bought pork. I bought turkey. I bought salmon. I bought tofu. I bought veggie burgers. I bought Amy's Mac & Cheese. I bought frozen lasagna. I bought frozen burritos. I bought frozen pizza. I bought soy ice cream and frozen yogurt. I bought milk, soy milk, cottage cheese, smoothies, yogurt, fresh pressed apple juice, cheeses (goat, mozzarella, cheddar, parmesan), fruit, eggs, berries. I bought fresh veggies. I bought frozen veggies. I bought baking supplies to make a crockpot cake recipe from the book that Laura bought for me. I bought everything in the store. Etc.

My lovely, six-year-new, side-by-side, built-in, KitchenAid refrigerator/freezer would be full in the coming weeks.

Do you see where this is headed?

Laura carried every single bag from the car to the kitchen.

When I opened the freezer? It was all frosty and drippy and not working.

But denial is my middle name, so I decided I must have left the door partially ajar that morning, although I could not think for what possible purpose I’d opened the freezer that morning, but it must have been left open accidentally because why else would the freezer be frosty and drippy and not working?

After I cleaned the frost and Laura mopped the water from the floor (I asked if she had any particular model cell phone in mind), I Googled troubleshooting instructions for my model fridge and reset some buttons and loaded all the food into it.

I went about my merry way where merry way equals I dealt with a comedic series of other errors where comedic series equals I ended up crying, and then I went to check the freezer again.

Everything in the freezer was melting and . . . now the fridge side was growing increasingly warmer.

Tom came home just as I started crying.

Tom was really nice to me.

So I stopped crying.

Then I Googled an appliance repair dude (that just sounds wrong), and Tom called him.

Dude couldn’t come until noon the next day.

So . . .

Tom and I moved all of our food to the small fridge in our garage where moved all of our food equals most of it because small. I had to triage.

The freezer got so warm last night we went ahead and baked some cookies in it.

This morning? Cold again. But will it stay cold if I put the food back into it? I can’t decide in my weakened condition.

So . . . please go vote for the KitchenAid repair poem that I wrote last week because I may or may not actually be hosting a KitchenAid repair person in my own kitchen later today. And because I cried. The poll is on the left side of Suburban Correspondent’s lovely new blog layout. :-)

On the upside, I’m pretty sure I can get Laura to move all of the food back into the house for us if I merely wonder aloud whether it is important for a cell phone to have texting capabilities . . .