It appeared we were headed for a relatively drama-free day yesterday.
And then the microwave died.
For elderly parents, the microwave qualifies as life support.
“That isn’t right, it’s practically new!” my mother exclaimed.
I knew that wasn’t true and when we tracked down the owner’s manual (my parents throw nothing away) there was a receipt attached from 1990.
So off to Lowe’s I went. I tried to find one that was as similar and simple as the one that died, but microwave technology has come far in the past 21 years and even the simplest one had more bells and whistles than I knew they could handle.
And I was right.
“The buttons are different!” was the first thing I heard when it came out of the box.
It was going to be a long afternoon.
As I tried to teach my father the ins and outs, I was reminded of Karen Black in “Airport ‘75” with the tower trying to teach her how to fly a 747. After about a half an hour, he seemed to catch on. He wanted to re-heat a cup of coffee and it seemed fairly simple...
There’s a button marked “:30”.
You push it.
I left him to it as I went to return a phone call and several minutes later I heard a commotion in the kitchen and came out to find my father, agitated, in front of the microwave watching his coffee boil over like Mt. Vesuvius. I still have no idea what went wrong.
It’s OK, I still have a week. Hopefully they’ll get it by then, otherwise they’ll starve to death.
Today is our first big outside excursion. We’re going to get my mother’s hair done.
It’s really been her only concern since surgery. Rehab and recovery? Not so much. When they first removed her breathing tube it was the first thing she asked about...
“How’s my hair?”
She could barely walk when she was released from the hospital last Wednesday, but somehow she just assumed she’d still make her standing Friday morning appointment. When we put the kabosh on that, she wasn’t happy. She informed us there was NO way she was going to go another week without having her coif re-done, so we compromised and scheduled it for today. In the meantime, the boyfriend gave her temporary doo over the weekend which was, quite frankly, better than what she normally gets. But all the while she was counting the minutes until her trip to the salon and now we’re off.
I hope it goes well. It should. The landing at Normandy went off with less planning than this trip.
