Micah and I love our apartment. I mean... ideally we want a house and are about to start the process of buying one, but our apartment is pretty sweet for newlyweds. People always look down on apartment life, but it's really not that bad. Sure, we've had our one crazy family that lived below us right when we moved in, but for the most part, the people around us are pretty decent, they aren't too loud, and we hardly notice them... except when they are playing video games downstairs and you can hear the same tune over and over again for hours or when their cigarette smoke somehow wafts up into our laundry closet. I just love the scent of tobacco lingering on my freshly cleaned clothes as I pull them out of the dryer... But really, we like apartment life. We have two pools, a workout facility, and if anything in our apartment breaks, Arizona law requires that our landlord fix it within 48 hours. Usually they come within twelve. It's amazing. The people in the office are nice. Our buildings and grounds are well maintained. And we live in a great location for dirt cheap (at least compared to Seattle). I won't even tell you our rent, so my Seattle readers don't have to cry. Because it's probably raining there...and if you start crying on top of that, water levels might get out of hand in the city (did I mention it's been 77 degrees here for the past week?) But the one downfall to our apartment has to be our appliances. We have two bedrooms, plenty of closets, new carpet, new woodwork, new paint, even a new washer and dryer, but our kitchen appliances suck. They might be older than we are. However, the apartment management told us when we moved in that if any of our appliances broke, instead of trying to fix them, they will just order us new ones, which is how they slowly renovate the apartments instead of doing a big, expensive remodel all at once. Since that day we have been praying, literally, that our appliances will break. Seriously. Sometimes before dinner, we will pray "Dear Lord, Thank you for this food and the oven that prepared it. But if you feel that time has come for us to have a new oven, you can break ours. Amen." They always say that God answers prayers with a "yes," "no," or "wait..." Well, we waited and the LORD HAS ANSWERED! First, it was the dishwasher. It stopped working a couple of weeks ago. Not that it really worked to begin with. It was so gross. The wires that hold the plates in place on the bottom were bent, so you couldn't actually fit dishes between some of them. And the inside was also somewhat rusty, and who doesn't love rust splattering all over their "clean" dishes? And the worst part was this weird white powder on the inside that always got sprayed onto the dishes and dried there. At first we thought it was our fault for using cheap dishwashing soap, so we switched to namebrand. No good. Maybe it was some kind of weird soap scum that had built up after 30+ years of service (seriously, it was old) or maybe it was asbestos.... Anyway, it stopped working one weekend with about three inches of nasty, standing asbestos water in the bottom. The guy came to fix it the next day and told me it was just a motor jam, which is an easy fix (boo!). However, he came back later to unjam it and we found a note that it was worse than a jam and we would be getting a new dishwasher delivered in the next few days. Hallelujah! The nasty, rusty, broken bottom rack Such a lovely exterior... A few days later I came home from school and was greeted by a big puddle of water at the top of our stairs. I looked up through the skylight at perfectly blue, sunny skies and couldn't figure it out. Then I walked inside to find this specimen of beauty and put it all together. The puddle was created by the old dishwasher as it made it's way down to it's final resting place... right next to the dumpster. Hello new friend. This one can actually hold an adequate amount of dishes... RIP. We won't miss you. We thought life couldn't get better, but then it did! We have had this ongoing problem with our oven since we moved in. Basically, if we turn our broiler on for longer than three minutes, it blows the fuse and the whole oven turns off. Typically, this happens right in the middle of cooking dinner which is always delightful. I have ignored it for many months now and just used the broiler minimally, but last week when our broiler blew the fuse again AND our buzzer broke in the same night (as in the old fashioned timer buzzer from our 80s oven was stuck ON until Micah unscrewed it with an oven mitt so the old rusty metal wouldn't cut his fingers) I had had enough. Have I mentioned I hate honking, buzzing or ringing noises? We called and complained again about our oven and a new one is arriving next week! When the maintenance guy came to look at it, he asked me in an uncertain voice, "Soo.....how does this thing cook?" Even he could tell that this oven was a disaster. The Lord has answered our prayers, so we no longer have to battle the temptation of appliance envy. He is good. ... Read more