The Thanksgiving Day Appliance Malfunction

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I hope everyone has a wonderful and blessed day.

I hope everyone spends time with family and friends.

I hope everyone has a bountiful table.

And, I hope everyone has better appliances than mine.

Yesterday, I wrote about my new appliance malfunctions that presented themselves Monday while preparing baked goods for the small people’s Thanksgiving feasts at school.

I didn’t mention this in my post, but I have to say that I was most thankful that we would not be cooking a Thanksgiving meal with those appliances.

Fortunately, or so I thought until this morning, we decided to head to the beach house and host Thanksgiving dinner there.

I am thankful that we did come here overall, because I love our small town at Thanksgiving. The Christmas decorations have just been put out, and there’s such an air of gratefulness and relaxation on people’s faces and in the little shops in our small island town that I just love.

But when we got to the house, we noticed the water dispenser on the fridge door wasn’t working. This is not the first time that this has happened. Fortunately, I’m legally and otherwise bound to an electrical engineer, who is great at fixing problems like this.

Except when he’s not.

In retrospect, he acknowledges that it would have been far, far easier and far, far more prudent to just live without a fridge water dispenser in the door for a day. But, he’s that kind of guy, the one who has to tinker with things until they are made right. And actually, he’s usually pretty successful. Seriously.

Just not today.

Thanksgiving Day.

If LCB told this story, he would have at least a dozen pages explaining the design flaw of the refrigerator in tedious detail. I know, because I heard all of the details yesterday, several times. Trust me, as your friend, you don’t want to go there.

So, to make a long story short, he had to turn off the fridge temporarily yesterday to fix the dispenser. In the middle of the night last night, I heard banging in the kitchen. I started to assume my kung fu stance, but then realized it was just LCB working on the dispenser, so I went back to sleep.

At first light, I woke to him saying, “Christine, Christine,” apprehensively.

“What?” I mumbled with something less than pleasantness in my voice, because I am far from a princess when I first wake up.

“When I got up last night to check everything, the fridge wasn’t on. So the turkey’s been sitting that way for who knows how long.”

That woke me up.

Then, scout’s honor, he went on to describe the two times he’s had food poisoning, with pain so bad that death would have seemed like a gift. “You know, I really don’t want to go through that again.” And he said it almost like I was asking him to consider it or something.

This is me we’re talking about, the girl who had H1N1 two years ago and afterwards said she’d probably prefer death or childbirth to going through that again. Yeah, I’m so all about chancing it with the turkey to save a few bucks.

And yet, he continues to discuss it, drawing even me into the conversation, and we have the 20 minute discussion that’s clearly unnecessary, as if we need to fully justify our wastefulness or something.

Like, LCB starts theorizing on who would take care of the kids while we’re hurling. And on what it would be like to have all of us sick simultaneously. I bring up the fact that, while I know they’re not super old (they’ll love this description of themselves, for sure), my parents are getting to that age where things like food poisoning might hit them harder.

It was the most pointless conversation I’ve had in a long time, both of us adding points of consideration to a decision that had already been made before we opened our mouths.

Fortunately, since we are cooking “on the road” so to speak, without our full kitchen arsenal at our disposal, we planned a simple meal, so we only had to throw a couple of other things away (besides the turkey, of course, unless any of y’all want it).

So, LCB donned some beachwear and headed out to the local grocery store in search of a properly stored turkey. Thankfully, he managed to secure one, so Thanksgiving will go on at the Island Family home as planned.

Sans the first turkey, of course.