A Tale Of Two Mixers

It’s no secret that Miss Terry loves to cook; it’s one of the many things she excels at. And there is no question about it, I enjoy all the wonderful things she makes.

Over the years, she has accumulated many top-quality kitchen tools and appliances, which she takes very good care of and appreciates. So she was dismayed a few days ago when her trusty old Vita-Mix Maxi 4000 Commercial mixer stopped working while she was making breakfast smoothies. This is a big, heavy monster that she has had for at least 30 years, long before I came into the picture. She flipped the switch on and off a few times, and we checked the outlet it was plugged into to see if she had tripped a circuit breaker, and found nothing wrong. Nothing except that it was, as the old saying goes, deader than a doornail.

Well, we can’t have that, can we? A true craftsperson in the kitchen must have the proper tools, don’t you think? So I went online to Amazon and found a replacement, a Vita-Mix 5200 professional grade mixer-blender. It was not cheap, but you get what you pay for. So yes, I bought my wife a mixer for Christmas. And no, I won’t be in trouble, because it’s something that she wanted to have. It is supposed to be delivered here sometime today.

Yesterday, Terry unplugged the old Vita-Mix unit to take it out to the garage because she just wasn’t ready to part company with it, and I heard her say something like, “Oh damn!” I went to the kitchen to see what was wrong, and she pushed the button, and the old Vita-Mix came to life.

It turns out that it has a push-button circuit breaker in the back of the unit which neither one of us realized or remembered after all these years. It was popped out, and as soon as Terry pushed it in to reset it, the Vita-Mix was as good as new again. Does anybody want a great deal on a new mixer?

In yesterday’s blog, I told you that we wanted to get our pontoon boat out of the garage and ready for the season. The first step to doing that was to get the scissor trailer out from where it sits next to our garage. My neighbor Jesse Bolton had offered to come over and help sometime over the three day weekend, but we are supposed to have a big storm coming in tonight or sometime tomorrow. I didn’t want the ground to get all soggy before we tried to move the heavy trailer, so I decided yesterday that Terry and I would do it. That job didn’t turn out to be nearly as easy as I thought it would.

The trailer has been sitting in one place for about 16 months, and the tires and the front crank down wheel, and the wood they had been sitting on, had all sunken into the ground. We pushed it in by hand when we parked it because there is no room to get a vehicle between the garage and the drainage canal that borders our property.

It took quite a while to get it out, and I wound up having to back the Explorer up as close to it as I could, attach a heavy-duty tow strap to the trailer, and pull it out a little bit at a time. The darn front wheel kept turning sideways, carving a rut in the area where we just planted our perennial peanuts a while back. Using a two by four as a lever and a block of wood as a fulcrum, I was able to push down enough to get the tongue up enough that Terry could put a piece of wood under that wheel and some more wood in front of it. I would pull until we got to the end of the wood and then start the whole procedure over again. It was not fun, and I really should have waited to bother Jesse about it, but the poor guy works hard all the time and I hate to add to his load.

At any rate, once we got it free, I put the trailer hitch into the receiver in the back of the Explorer and found out that it’s too high for the trailer. So then I had to put the hitch in the F-150 and use it to pull the trailer completely out, and then back it in again on the cement parking apron on the other side of the garage.

By the time we were finished, we were both hot and sweaty and hurting, but we got the job done. One step in the process out of the way.

Once we got that project done, I managed to crank out another 2,000 words in my next John Lee Quarrels book, then we had a light dinner. We tried to watch TV after dinner, but we were so worn out that we both kept nodding off, so we called it an early night.

My latest book, Big Lake Hoarder, which came out earlier this month, is still on the charts at number 16 on Amazon’s Hot New Release list for mysteries and police procedures, and in some very good company. Thank you, everybody, for your support.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for a new Free Drawing. This week’s prize is an audiobook of Big Lake Lynching, the second book in my Big Lake mystery series. To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening.

Thought For The Day – Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9 p.m. is the new midnight.