A New Appliance

I’m very disciplined about going to bed and getting up.

Same time every day.

I push everything back an hour on the weekends so I was in bed by eleven on Friday night.

Of course, me and the cat are the only truly disciplined ones in the house. Kathy, Ollie and Sam are night people.

Which can be a pain because I’m also a light sleeper, and Kathy and Sam can be chatty.

I heard them talking about life at 1:15. I made a trek to the bathroom and mentioned something about winding it up.

At 2:30, I was awake again because they were now talking about a problem - the refrigerator wasn’t working. Sam was moving meat to the freezer.

“We have a problem,” Kathy said when she saw me in the morning.

“The refrigerator is broken,” I said.

“You knew?” She asked.

“I heard about it at 2:30 this morning.”

“So now what?”

“We buy a new refrigerator,” I said. “We bought the last one in 1997. We got enough out of it.”

“We have to research it,” Kathy said.

Now, that’s the basic difference between us.

An hour and a half later, we had a brand new refrigerator on the way.

“I called Matt to help you remove the old one,” Kathy said. “He’s going to be here in a couple of hours.”

Twenty minutes later, I took the old refrigerator out to the garage with a little help from Jake.

“I don’t procrastinate,” I said.

Later in the evening, Kathy was looking at me.

“What?”

“You did good.”

I laughed.

“Saturday night,” she said, “And we’re all excited about getting a new appliance. How can we celebrate?”

“By going to bed,” I said.

“Damn, we’re old.”

Yep.