Mid-Summer, sigh.

I long for muted, cool places.  Out of the sun, humidity and grit.  I am sticky and gritty most of the days at work.  Cleaning petunias is just about the worst thing to be forced to do.

I collected this photo of a bath with shower for my carpenter.  I want the baths to be about nothing.  The absence of "stuff".

Now--to the meat of this post.  My refrigerator.  A RANT!!!  Naming names.

My fridge is less than 18 months old.  The fridge part has stopped "holding temperature" while the freezer part continues to work.  I got this phrase from G who was in the restaurant business for over 30 years.  He knows about failure to hold temp.  Food gets warm.

We called our service warranty provider.  It will be 5 days or more before they can sent a technician.  They tried calling the two providers that are local.  One no longer has any employees trained to fix anything and the second didn't answer their business phone.  Five days with a fridge that won't hold temperature is a bit too long.  In July.

G then asked to speak to a supervisor. After 40 minutes he got one. In Michigan.  That's when we got an appointment.  In 5 days. Because we live in a "rural" area.  And she also gave us a 6 month "free" extension to our warranty.  Now, from my point of view, that warranty is worth nothing.  More of it?  Less than nothing.

G then called Loews where we bought the fridge and the warranty.  By then we wanted to "return" the fridge and get a new replacement.  They said no but offered us a "loaner" fridge for the 5 days.  It would come the next day between 2 and 5 pm.

We waited.  5pm came and went.  Then, at 8:30, I saw the Lowes truck.  Two guys brought in a very nice utility fridge and strongly suggested we put it on the back porch and not the garage.  From experience, they knew we would be using the "loaner" far longer than 5 days.  Cause they can't get "parts".  They said "keep it" as LONG as you want.  Just call when your  fridge is fixed.

We were also told we are "lucky" to have bought a Whirlpool.  The "unlucky" are the folks who purchased Samsung fridges ( I almost did) because there are NO technicians who can service Samsung in the entire state of Maine.  Which means none of the ones that have failed to hold temperature are even waiting to be fixed.  They are just broken.  Period.

They guys who delivered the loaner had been out since 7 am and still had two loaner fridges on the truck to deliver.

The point of this post:  buy local from the guy in your Town or city who hires and pays a guy to service your purchases.  Whirlpool couldn't care less (from our perspective on a 45 minute wait to get to talk to someone about service and then another 40 minutes to wait to speak to a supervisor).  Lowes was at least nice enough to give us a way to have cold food while we waited.

It was very nice to have cold milk with my bran flakes this morning instead of room temp milk.

In Garden News.  I have four lovely, shiny, heavy zucchini in the loaner fridge and I am making chocolate zucchini bread tomorrow (day off) and a pan of zucchini brownies.  I didn't get any zukes last summer and I am very happy with my harvest so far.  I might have enough to make a few jars of zucchini bread and butter pickles.   The cucumber plants are climbing the trellis.  Yeah!!!  And my yellow onions are about 3 inches in diameter.  I also have two little turnips.  I had three but I ate one. Raw with salt.