Sunday, December 08, 2002
Sometime late last week Erika came back from her Mother's, bringing back a couple of Vanessa's favourite nightgowns that she had repaired. Erika said that they were much whiter than our old washing machine could provide. So it was time to buy a new washing machine. And while we wee at it, we might as well get a new fridge while we were at it, replacing one that drips water onto the floor.
Erika's Mother had also recently acquired a fridge and washing machine from Sears, and since she had done all of the research as to best prices and selection, we just went with that. We went online to the Canadian Sears Web site looking for info, and then went to the U.S. site. when we wanted to research more options. Basically, Erika knew what she wanted fridge-wise: a white fridge that would fit in the same space as the old one but was more capacious and had a sliding freezer drawer at the bottom (where you'd think that physics alone would determine that's where it should be on most fridges). All of the washers seemed pretty much the same in terms of size, and differ in price only insomuch as they have more and more features. Ideally, we wanted an energy-saving model.
No thanks to the Canadian Sears Web site, I found out by phone that a sister Sears store was open at 10am on Sunday. There was no answering service at all for the Sears appliance store we were heading to, so we hoped it would be the same.
We got there at about 10:30, and walked into the store. We walked right into an Xmas party -- turns out that the store was not in fact open until 11am, and that we had stumbled upon an employees' family party. But they let us in anyways and let us wander around the appliances section unattended for half an hour, which gave us a good chance to size up everything. By the time a saleswoman came to deal with us, we more or less picked out which ones we wanted, and most of the time was spent dealing with finances. Both fridge and washer will be delivered on Thursday while I am working at home.
Then off to Ikea, where we heard we could get an Xmas tree for $15 (much cheaper than what we paid for one last year) and pick up a few generic frames I wanted to get. We got there, Vanessa helped us to pick out a tree, she played in the "ball room" for a while, I got what I wanted and then we had lunch. (Genuine Swedish meatballs. Yum! ;-) Along the way I also got thoroughly lost in the store. The "let's lead you through a maze" is great for when you want to browse and maybe grab a few things, but sucks when you really only want one or two specific things like I did.
I found it somewhat disturbing that the picture and frames section at Ikea had several posters of the pre-9/11 skyline of NYC. Pre-terrorist nostalgia? I can't imagine buying one, as it would be a constant reminder of what once was.
By the time we were done with everything, it was not even 2pm.
Later in the afternoon, we got the Xmas tree set up, and Vanessa had a great time decorating it. Consequently only the lower half of the tree is decorated, but it does look nice, and Vanessa felt very proud of her efforts afterwards. ;-)
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