Funny how things work

I wrote up this really long post today.  You can thank me for not posting it :-)  Can we say, "Would you like some cheese with that whine?"  Hmmm, yes, well on to other things.  I am trying, really I am, to look on the bright side of things, or to find some humor in the everyday upsets.  Today.  Yes, today, we were heading out the door to drop Isabella and Moira off to their stable work.  With all the food prep and canning I've done, believe it or not that usually spells no meals.  Yeah, silly, but I'm too worn out to do any more cooking!  Ha, ha.  So we quickly set up the popcorn popper to get that started and I brought out the blender to make a smoothie.

Now, I have to say that over all I make sure before we buy a big item that we have already proven that we need it.  Take my wheat grinder for instance.  I was working that thing to death.  It could only do 3 cups of flour (that means only about 2 cups of wheat berries) at a time.  You could do two hoppers full, totaling 6 cups of flour, until you needed to give it at least a 20 minute break to cool it down.  I had to have a whole day set aside to grind enough to freeze as it just took so long to get what we needed.  But I think I had it for close to 4 years before we got a powerhouse grinder.  That grinder came with our mixer.  Again, after years of baking and overworking a number of hand held mixers we made a big purchase for a mixer/grinder combo.  And I've never regretted it since.  That thing gets used all the time. 

Two exceptions come to mind in regards to using something on a smaller scale and working our way up.  Those are our dehydrator and canner.  We actually have a cheap dehydrator, and it rarely got used.  It was a lot of work to make it do what I needed it to do.  So it sat in my cupboard.  The other is a canner.  I didn't have one, but I knew that I knew I was going to use it.  Since we have a large family getting a small one didn't make sense.  If I had the space I would have loved to go with the huge canner, as it can hold 14 quart jars at a time!!!  Wowzers!  But, really, doing 7 quarts at a time generates a lot of work to, and I think this is more doable. 

I pulled out our older dehydrator, now that I'm doing a lot of dehydrating, thinking that I should use that as well, to get even more done.  After I tried that I realized why I didn't use it!  The holes are too big, and all my food kept falling through!  I've been very happy with my dehydrator and canner, and they have gotten a ton of use already.

That brings me to one appliance that we use ALL the time.  My blender.  I really started using a blender on a regular basis probably 6 years ago.  In that time we've gone through 4 blenders.  We buy the ones at Walmart.  So, getting back to my story from the beginning.  I whipped out my blender and threw in some almonds to make some almond milk for our smoothie.  No more milk for us :-(  Not until next spring!  It's buzzing around on high speed, when all of a sudden it switches gears and is only running on low.  Weird.  So I shut it off, or at least tried to, but after pushing the off button it would shut off and then restart (on low) two seconds later.  So I unplugged it.  Maybe it needed to 'reset'.  I plugged it back in and hit the low button.  Nothing.  No power.  Another blender bites the dust.  Ugh.

The funny of all this?  This is the one appliance I use all the time, that we haven't upgraded.  Go figure.  With too many other needs on the list we will probably go with another Walmart cheapo, so expect another post from me in 18 months or so talking about our broken blender.  I wonder if we can get long term insurance on those things :-P