Miscellany II

To satisfy the photo requirement... tonight's stir-fry:


Super-chewy round steak, carrots, broccoli, bok choy, onions... and a sauce reminiscent of my favorite Thai Lemon Beef. Pretty tasty!

No, that's not what I'm here to talk about, though.

No, tonight's post is about our friendly household appliances.

Over the years, we have named them. They begin to display peculiar personalities... or at least, we think they do. So, they need names. Sometimes this even goes beyond appliances. I used to have a small, stand-alone pantry. It was white, nondescript, but very helpful. We named it Jeeves. Unfortunately, the movers deemed Jeeves too precarious to be heaved onto a truck and carted long, jolty distances. So, he was given to a wonderful friend, to help store her homeschooling stuff.
Our daughter, the Fairy Child, got on board with this idea, and named every single thing. The ones we can remember are:
Refrigerator: Martha
Coffeemaker: Jose
Rice maker: Fukui-san

The most-notable, most-esteemed, most-favored appliance in our home, though, is Ed.
Ed is not a kitchen appliance. No, his station is much higher. Ed provides our muse, senses our moods, and serves the grooves. Ed is our 200-disc CD changer. Ed is sentient. Ed is wise. Ed knows what we want to hear before we even imagine it. We almost always leave him in "shuffle" mode, so he can make his own choices. When the sun is shining, it's Friday afternoon, and it just has to be Happy Hour somewhere, Ed reminds us how good life is with a little taste of Margaritaville. When the sun is down, the feeling is mellow, and the Scotch has been poured, Ed lulls us with smoky, jazzy "Crush." (Dave Matthews Band, for the uninformed.)
Every now and then, though, Ed gets moody. We think he wants a girlfriend... one of the newish 300-disc changers. When he's feeling sulky he becomes a smart-ass and plays completely inappropriate music and/or jarring combinations. Like, immediately after one of us mentions how hard it is to wake up this morning, and he plays a slow, soothing Diana Krall song instead of a blood-pumping Guns N Roses tune. Or like when he queued up "Leaving On a Jet Plane" the morning The Grill Geek deployed to Iraq.

We love Ed. We spent the afternoon primping and preening him, reorganizing and finally entering the right names for CDs, after much "listen to this." He was a bit of a mess. Now he's fit and trim and ready to go again. Although I still think he wants a girlfriend.