Wee Mousie, Wee Mousie

Finally finally finally, things are getting back on track. The Wee Mousie series (Teapot Mouse shown above) is added to Celtic Elegance. Several other Fall season designs are added this week as well, and our contributions toward the disaster recovery continue to grow as well.

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in other news

A tribute to The Way Things Were and Still Should Be: Late in 1978, my husband and I bought a microwave oven. It was huge, came in a box that could house half of Van Nuys, weighed as much as a small Chevy, and came with a instruction manual that was worthy of most supercomputers of the day. We plugged it in, and it worked. It was an incredible device for us at the time, and we created a shrine for it above and to one side of the stove. Neither of us was particular sure what to do with it, as we were both quite comfortable with cooktop and oven food preparation and eating. (Well, not quite true. He cooked, not I - I didn't really learn how to cook for fewer than 11 people until I was well into my 40s.) Eventually we figured it out, and eventually the incredible device became part of our daily routine. As nuke fare got up to speed, the device eventually replaced nearly all cooking on stove, although the oven still remained in use.

Best I can guess, this microwave has been run at least twice a day every day for 27 years, except the very brief times we've been on vacation. It has been spattered, splattered, kicked once, dropped once (onto a soft surface). It has been tinkered with inadvertently. The plug-in thermometer vanished in 1984, thanks to an exploratory grandchild. Its inner surfaces have been subjected to cleaning products both mild and abrasive, despite the cautionary tone of the voluminous manual.

Last night it made a loud growling noise.

My husband and I looked at each other in surprise. It has never made any noise before, except the monotonic whirring that it always makes when the heavy glass turntable is spinning. Well, it did once, when someone whose name shall be left out to protect his privacy, when that someone chose to microwave a bowl of clay "just to see what would happen". It uttered a howl and spat forth a shower of sparks worthy of a blacksmith's anvil in protest of this mistreatment. The clay coated the innards of the cavity, and that someone got to clean it up because his wife (me) refused to do so.

But last night it made a loud growling noise. We silently prepared our requiems to the Ancient Microwave. We glanced at the stack of Consumer Reports, trying to remember which issue had the comparative study and Best Buy flags on microwaves. We mentally counted our nickels and dimes, resigned to replacing the venerable beast.

Then it stopped growling and went back to work, finished cooking the nukeable dinner, and went back to whatever microwave ovens do when they're not microwaving. It worked just fine this morning for breakfast and again just fine for lunch. No growling.

Perhaps it just wanted to remind us that it was there, serving us in relative silence, several times a day for 27 years.