We had to replace a washer this year also, at the farm. It whammed and banged a lot, and the last time we had a service call, they told us that the proposed fix and the cost of two service calls (one for confirmation of the diagnosis and to order the parts, then one to install the parts) would be $400-500, half the cost of a new washer. I was still thinking about salvaging it, but when I called, they couldn't get us an appointment with a repair person for two weeks. It was around Presidents' Day then, and Home Depot was having an appliance sale, and I dropped by there and they told me they could deliver and install in three days. Usually we run our appliances until forever (our dryer and dishwasher were both purchased in 2001 and are still going strong like the Energizer Bunny). But it seemed like not worth running our money out with the rinse cycle to keep repairing it.
I'm down a pound from the last week. That's nice! I did expect something of the kind, because husband and son have gone for a couple of days at the beach. When they aren't here, I don't eat much. Handful of nuts and some deli salad, that's dinner. And I've been able to stay off the Dr. Pepper! I did have some lemonade a couple of times last week, but no longer even have D.P. in the house. With all the new press on how soda sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup seems related to getting Altzheimer's and other health problems, I have to pay attention. Even if that proves to be correlation and not causation, such as, it makes people fat and the fat is the thing that causes the health issues, I'm glad to let it scare me off the bad Doctor.
Last spring, our outdoor cat at the farm died, and we found last week that we have had a mouseapalooza in a couple of rooms at the farm. (Surprisingly, though, not in the kitchen or pantry.) We had been setting traps for a month, but once we went to the farm last week to stay, we could see that it was more than random mouse activity. They ate their way through a box of Ivory Soap bars in the linen closet, literally eating a lot of the soap. They piled candy wrappers (and poop) in one corner of our son's room (where some leftover Christmas stocking candy was). They moved a bunch of the cats' corncob litter into my son's dresser drawers, presumably to eat in their hour of need next winter when they ran out of Christmas candy. My husband had been setting mousetraps for the last month (though he hadn't seen this evidence in detail, he could see mice had been around) and has killed about seven mice since then, and this past weekend we vacuumed and mopped and removed all places where there was mouse evidence, and I've taken our cats over and they are at the farm now. But it feels kind of grim. (Which is odd, because when we were newlyweds we lived in the room that is now our son's room and occasionally could hear mice in the walls, and we thought it was a little annoying but just figured the cats would handle it and were not very bothered.) The farm is updated since then (when we were newlyweds, it didn't even have insulation) so possibly that's why it bothers me so much; we didn't have a lot of high expectations of an uninsulated hundred-year-old farmhouse that the wind whistled through in the winter, when we were first there. But I'm calling Orkin tomorrow.
Have a great week!