We're still as cheap and lazy as ever but now our oven can preheat

Meeting. Meeting. Teleconference. Meeting. Training. Meeting. Meeting. Phone calls. Meeting. I think that pretty much summarizes my week so far. Although yesterday, I had to sit through my boss talking about the big award a colleague was getting for something she and I did together. Which was odd, because, I distinctly remember helping and yet my name wasn’t in the award part of the story. Come again?

The only bright side is that I seem to be in a impossibly pleasant mood this week so I didn't really care. For example, I had to have meeting after meeting delivering bad news to various people all day Tuesday and it didn’t phase my pleasant mood one iota. I actually had to stop myself from smiling at one point so I could start the bad news. Because, seriously, don’t you hate people that don’t stop smiling before they give you bad news? We used to have a higher up in my office that cracked jokes and chewed gum while delivering crappy news. Came across flippant every time. Dude was less than popular.

Perhaps my great mood is because I finally loosened up the purse strings over the weekend and announced to my husband that we needed to improve our ugly retro kitchen. Usually I'm cheap and lazy and figure I can hold out until we move to a new house. But then Saturday as I washed dishes in our fugly dirt brown sink, it dawned on me that I spend a lot of my time in that kitchen and that the quality of my life could be better if it didn’t have to be quite so ugly. So I announced on a whim that we needed to buy a new microwave. Just like that.

And the microwave wasn’t even fugly brown. It was just all kinds of retro fugly and sorta ghetto. It only worked at like 50% strength too. In our defense, it was over the range and we didn’t care about replacing it when we moved because we already owned a perfectly good counter top microwave. So like the lazy cheapos that we are, we just slapped our counter top microwave on the counter. Then we discovered that 2 microwaves at dinnertime is sort of awesome when you’re serving leftovers and now it’s been 3 ½ years. But it's just as fugly today as it was 3 ½ year ago and it took up valuable counter space in an otherwise small kitchen. Badaboom. Had to go.

And if you’re going to shop for a new over the range microwave you may as well get a new stove while you're at it. Because nothing points out how retro fugly your stove is like seeing fancy new ones in the store. Don't believe me? Fine:

Wait. You still don't look convinced. How about an up close shot of the top:

On top of the obvious lack of aesthetics, it also had several technical issues worth pointing out. For example, the hideous clock didn’t work and there was no preheat setting. We'd just turn it on, wait a few minutes and hope for the best. But, even better, it was 25 degrees off. Recipe calls for 450. Our oven needed to be set to 475. Sometimes my husband would forget and be confused when stuff wasn't done yet when he'd go to check on it. I swear to you, retro is only charming when someone else owns it.

But it's all good, because here are our new appliances:

I love them. Maybe it’s because these are the first new appliances I’ve ever bought. Maybe it's because I want to take them to lunch and buy them a grande margarita and tell them all my deep dark secrets. Like how sometimes in between meetings I write blog entries about my new appliances. Or like how new appliances don’t mean I’ve given up wanting to move to the new house I secretly shop for on Realtor.com. Because I do and we will. And, in fact, we bought relatively cheap appliances knowing just that. But the new appliances will prevent my head from exploding until we get to a new house. Because when I look at them, I no longer wonder where my life went wrong. As an additional benefit, they may or may not make the house more marketable.

I'm so stoked about the new appliances I even told my husband he can redo the floors in the front room like he’s been wanting to since we moved in. Did I mention there’s carpeting under our dining room table and we have two small children? Gag me. I try not to look at the floor too much when I walk through there. When we moved in, all the bathrooms had carpeting too. That’s like gag me squared. Did the previous owners not have children that liked to flood the bathroom periodically? What were they thinking? Like I'm one to talk. My kitchen had two microwaves in it for 3 ½ years. But let's not dwell on that. Because now it doesn't! Whee!