So we're electrical engineers . . .

On Friday, Kevin defended his masters thesis and passed with flying colors. As is traditional, there was food for the committee and audience. Kevin's parents brought a wide variety of foods, including a fair amount of fruit. In addition, they filled our fridge with even more fruit.

Combined with the fact that we have a lot of milk to get through fast, I decided it was time for us to use the blender for the second time in our married lives and make some shakes.

The first was a strawberry pineapple orange juice blend. As we moved the pitcher from the table to the blender base, some orange juice dripped out. We hurried and put it on the base and determined to tighten it when the fruit was blended.

After blending it, Kevin tried to tighten the pitcher. Only problem was, it didn't seem to follow the lefty-loosey righty-tighty rule, so instead as he lifted the pitcher up all of the shake spilled out over the base and counter and microwave.

Not being one to waste food, I grabbed a spoon and began to eat the shake (at least the stuff that had just spilled onto clean stuff like the base). Unfortunately, it needed ice cubes and sugar, so after a few bites we determined it wasn't worth eating and began to clean it up. After going through several paper towels, I had the brilliant idea to rinse off the rest of the base in the sink. I knew enough not to immerse the base in water, but I probably used more water to rinse it off than I should have.

After it was all clean, Kevin decided to plug the base in so we could try again. As he plugged it in, the motor started whirring. It's not supposed to do that. I decided to get any remaining water out by blowing it dry with my hair dryer (on its cold setting, of course . . . we don't believe in setting fires in our apartment). So I dried it and plugged it in and the motor wasn't whirring. I figured it was all fixed so I brought it back. But now it wasn't just that the motor wasn't turning on . . . none of it was turning on. We had broken the blender (mostly me, but I'll share some blame with Kevin).

Well. We still had a lot of fruit and milk we wanted to use up, so we remembered another appliance we had used exactly once in our marriage -- the food processor! We filled this one up with milk and strawberries and bananas and oats and pressed "grind."

Nothing. We tried a different outlet. Still nothing. Checked to see if there were any other switches that needed to be turned on first. Nope. Checked to see if anything had tripped the circuit breaker. Nope.

And just like that, we had a broken blender and a broken food processor. Good thing we never used them! (It kind of put a damper in our homemade salsa plans, but the peppers had already died anyway.) Those are two things we won't have to pack to Michigan!

The blender graveyard

But yeah. Here we both are with masters degrees in electrical engineering and neither of us had a clue how to fix the blender or food processor. To be fair, we both got our masters in radar, not in household appliances. But still.

On a happier note, Leslie was over here and was using my laptop and she kind of broke the keyboard about the same time we discovered the broken food processor, but she figured out the problem. Maybe she should have done electrical engineering.

On another happy note, we did get to eat our shake eventually because our neighbors were kind enough to lend us theirs for a few minutes. And the shake was . . . yummy enough. And healthy.

On yet another happy note, we've been enjoying faces like this for the past week:

I've decided that every post can be improved with a picture of a baby.  Maybe I am a mommy blogger after all.