It’s beginning to get to me that I haven’t committed a creative act in a week. I know, I’ve been shutting down school, and today was given over to trying to get the new appliances installed and the cats to the vet, but still. My goal was to create something every day.

I don’t like failing in my commitments, so this is an underlying stress that is exacerbated by the very things that are keeping me from creating.

For example, the installation of the appliances. The guys from Sears showed up at about 11:30, and that was fine. It was no problem at all emptying the refrigerator quickly, I had already emptied the freezer and culled the contents of the refrigerator itself, and moving the old appliances out was a snap.

Moving the new ones in was a snap as well. Hooking them up was not a problem. But then the stove wouldn’t fit correctly in the cutout in the island. We looked it over and decided that however the old stove (with the same dimensions) had fit in there, the new one had to slide further back and was being stopped from doing that by the gas pipe. We decided that the gas pipe had to be dropped back down into the basement and the stove hooked up down there, thus allowing the whole thing to fit firmly into the island.

Only the Sears guys couldn’t do that. Were they telling me that all they did was bring the appliance into the house and plug them in, I asked incredulously? That was exactly what they were telling me. A call to Sears confirmed that when I paid for installation, what they actually meant was plugging in, something which I was quite capable of doing for myself, a fact I pointed out to the manager. Abashed, he volunteered to take the installation charge off the bill.

That did not solve my problem, which was that I wanted to have these appliances completely installed by the end of the day so that Ginny wouldn’t have to deal with it on Monday after I was gone. (The water line to the icemaker in the refrigerator was also nonfunctional.)

I did track down a contractor who could do the job, but he couldn’t come until tomorrow morning. I had to be satisfied with that.

On a more positive note, both appliances functioned beautifully. The refrigerator is quiet and the stove works like a charm.

On a still more positive note, we watched a lovely movie called Malèna which we highly recommend you add to your Netflix list. It had lain around the house for months, and we were never “in the mood” to watch it. Foolish, indeed. I can’t remember now why I had added it to the list, but it’s a wonderful movie. And Monica Belucci is stunningly gorgeous.