An Emergency Move

Things came to a head last week: our 17+ year-old clothes washing machine was acting up in ways that were worrisome. T, ever the consummate troubleshooter, looked up the problem online. "Oh no," she exclaimed. "It sounds like the main bearing is shot. We could replace it, but it would cost at least as much as buying new, and with no guarantee that anything else about that machine wouldn't catastrophically fail shortly after."

"Merde." I said wittily, and we hopped in the car, carefully enmasked, to see about buying a new machine. The process was relatively painless. As is her wont, T had already scoped out Consumer Reports for the most highly-rated machines, and as it happened they had the model we wanted in stock - if we were willing to take the floor model. Supply issues have hit the appliance industry hard. Nothing about them is considered essential, or so I gathered, so many factories are shut down with no end in sight to the supply drought for new machines. We bought the thing we'd just been kicking and leaning on and counted ourselves lucky. That was Wednesday. On Friday, our new machine would be delivered.

Once back in the car, we looked at each other and groaned. Our basement...

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