Chilly evenings here and lots of wind, not much of an incentive to gather on the Back Porch. But here is a short ponder for you today. My luck with electrical appliances is not all that good…or might be that they don’t make them like they used to. I won’t get into brands but stoves and refrigerators keep me in financial peril. Our stove which is six years old by the way, the oven no longer works in it. No my wife and I both sit down and talk this over and discovered that to get the oven repaired would entail two huge problems. Because of the excessive cost of operating a business nowadays a standard service call if you do not have the service contract on the appliance is about $150, yes you heard me right, now there may be some out there that are much less but in my area where I live the standard call is $150.  I’m gonna try to get this correct, it is confusing but when the service determines what’s wrong with the appliance and they order the parts to fix it the cost of those parts plus the labor to put back in the appliance that’s your bill, in most cases they graciously do not charge you the 150. So what happens if they come out and do not find anything wrong after examining the appliance and doing whatever it is that they do, you will owe them $150. Now, we have a refrigerator that the lights inside of the refrigerator on all levels they go out periodically. We have a service contract on that and we call, they come out, they replace one small part because it’s not the bulbs that are going out. It has something to do with the system. But anyway they replaced that part and the refrigerator runs. We’ve had it three years. In those three years we’ve had at least four calls to come out and fix the lights. Our warranty on the refrigerator is due to be renewed at the fine cost of $600 for three years. We have decided not to renew that warranty. Well refrigerator got to making a strange noise and my wife who is ever vigilant about these things suggested that we get that checked out. We both know that the warranty has not been reinstated so we ended up paying $150 for a service call from a local business to tell us there wasn’t anything wrong. My wife and I decided since there was no warranty on the stove it expired, we won’t go mess around with this business anymore because we’ve had trouble with that brand of appliance in the past so we just decided we’d buy a new stove. Now be patient because we’re almost to the ponder. We found a stove which met our needs at a reasonable price excellent delivery and set up service so we bought it and I’m happy to say that we bought it from a local business that made me even happier. Now here is the ponder. You know that old saying, keep it simple stupid, well why can’t women do that? After the stove was installed we both were pleased with the way it operated the controls and everything about it except this particular stove, did not have that high back on it with the clock, and all that stuff, the controls up on the back sitting behind the stove. All of the controls for this particular stove were located right above where the oven door is easily seen, easily got to, I thought fairly simple and very effective. But you guessed it my wife was absolutely intrigued by the fact that there was a bare wall back there where there had always been a stove top the upper part with the controls. She worried about that for several days and finally, we decided that maybe we could put some kind of a backsplash back there which is smart and reasonable. But then we decided, she decided that right behind the stove was not good enough we needed to extend it out on both sides. Work was balanced so that meant we had to do a wall. Now when we looked at that wall across from the stove and I have a galley style kitchen, so you know what I’m speaking of there’s another wall close by, naturally cabinets over it and such but it’s major wall, so to match the wall we just tiled, We decided to tile a backsplash behind the sink in the counter space there. I hope you’re still with me and I didn’t mean to confuse anybody. I was having a hard time for one thing figuring out what I could share with you this week from the porch and you know how desperate I am because this is the best I could do. Go back to the kitchen again.We picked out a tile, we found a local gentleman that did excellent tile work because we knew several people he had worked for and so we had him over. He gave us the estimate and a reasonable time frame to do the job with tiles that my wife picked out and so we said OK let’s do it. So let’s wrap this up. It’s really very simple. The two walls cost me more than a stove, but my wife is extremely happy with the ambience that it has created. So before I get to the final ponder, let me make one disclaimer. When I say we concerning these decisions as to what we were going to do, I would like to inform you that we was one and that one was my wife and I agreed in a spirit of love and cooperation. So here’s my Ponder…. Why do they do that?

Kurt