Today at the Evil Empire, or perhaps you know it as Wal-Crap, I bought both a new microwave AND a new toaster oven. The ones I had before were old and behaving bizarrely and were perhaps (hopefully) contributing to ridiculously high electric bills.

The toaster oven would cook everything as expected except for toast. It would take, no lie, 10 minutes to make bread sort of less soft. The new toaster oven has superpowers, and we burnt taco shells in about 15 seconds. It will take getting used to.

The old microwave did a really amazing job at cooking whatever container the food was in, but leaving the food cool. It was a quite impressive trick, but frustrating, and resulted in cracked ceramic bowls, burned fingers, and lots of swearing. The new microwave does its job well, and quietly. It’s kind of boring, but I think we’ll adapt.