Hearing that jingle

There has been spectacularly little going on lately. I come over to DL, the system nags me and tells me it's been five days since I wrote anything, and I think, "well, it's been five days since anything really happened."

In the last five days...

• Suzanne killed the oven. She was turning it on to preheat it to make more of the spectacular brownies I like (though these were for some church meeting) and the display winked off and... that was that. Gotta hand it to the old Whirlpool AccuBake 365 for holding up so well against a storm of cat hair, cat dust and cat whiz, and doing it for almost nine years, but there's also a part of me that remembers that Minnie's old electric range and oven dated from some time in 1953 and lived until 1998, and was at least partly functional when we took it out. Then again, the Whirlpool is also partly functional, in that the burners in the Ceran cooktop do work properly, but the oven, the broiler, the self-clean, the timer, the oven light and every other thing that depends on the candy-bar-sized computer controller has failed. We're going over tonight to have a look at a much-less-expensive GE/Hotpoint, one that still manages to look nearly identical to the dying Whizzpool.
  
• A new cat has been hanging around the house, a Bertlike stripeycat who appears to be female and maybe seven or eight months old. She's obviously been around humans enough to know good smellyfood when she eats it, but doesn't have a lot of trust yet. She'll likely end up with the other morons in the house before the winter comes.
  
• I finally installed the subwoofer in the Volkswagen. It is loud indeed.
  
• I got a real deal on closeout CDs at AnywhereCD, since they're going out of business on September 30. Seven bucks or less to get both a physical CD and immediately-downloadable, no-DRM MP3 files sampled at 192kbps. I was delighted and bought nine. I was less delighted that their system puked the first time I put the transaction through, so I hit it again and it went, but of course charged my card twice.
  
• Ken Burns' new film The War has started on PBS. If you haven't started watching it, you should.
  

I am hearing an ice cream truck from somewhere. This is most strange, as my new office is in a really out-of-the-way office park on a nondescript side road, and there aren't any little kids for a mile at least.