01 February 2008

Appliance Love (No Not That Kind!!)

When you get married (and if you've played your Crate and Barrel registry hand-scanner-laser-tag correctly) you will get lots of appliances and other doodads to finish off your new place. They make cooking time so much easier, and faster.

And then you move to the Land-of-other-voltage, aka Germany. For eight months we have been debating on whether or not to get a voltage converter, this wonderful (yet overly expensive) heavy mass of electrical ingenuity that will magically make our American appliances work here. We had tried once, early on, and I have to say, I broke the thing on the first try when I hooked up my beloved Dyson vacuum cleaner and turned it on. I like to clean (I mean, hey, I have a Dyson for crying out loud) and that whole experience was a downer and I was put off the whole converter experience for a while.

Then we tried doing a cost benefit analysis (I know, who does such a thing? This is permanent brain damage from where I used to work.) of what it would take to replace the appliances we needed for the next two and half years, and whether that would be a better thing to do.

I think a couple things started to push us over the edge towards buying this damn converter:

1. The way I make the coffee. I do not believe that coffee can be too thick or too strong. If you can stand a spoon straight up in it, even better. Hubbo, on the other hand, likes his coffee to not resemble coffee at all except in name. If he made the coffee, he would put a pinch of it in the filter with a gallon of water and still put four tablespoons of coffee creamer in his cup. An automatic coffee maker really keeps out the grit (which he likes) and I can still get a strong cup (which I like). We have been using a French press up till now. Stocks in coffee creamer have gone up considerably. Luckily, I take the proceeds and use it to buy more yarn.

2. "We could have that for dinner if only we had the ___________." Which of course we did have the __________, but it was in another voltage. Our menu options were seriously curtailed. How many times can you eat pasta?

So now we have this thing and we have already revived the rice cooker from the bomb shelter and next we will go dig out the coffee machine and the sewing machine. We are in heaven. Nothing feels more like home when you rack up the electricity bill in your own native voltage. And it even serves double duty by being really heavy--if someone tries to break in the house I can swing it at them to knock them out (it is really that heavy).

1 comment:

Debbie T said...

What!?!? No Starbuck's down on the corner? I'm with you...I like my coffee to BE coffee.

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