So on fridge arrival day, I was up at the crack of dawn excited to do laundry. You know you’re a grown up when…

The most pressing thing to wash were my whites, including my sheets. I love how those sheets feel on my bed, but as I expected, they have been a giant pain in the ass to keep looking nice. Now that I have a proper laundry room and all the time in the world to let my sheets sit under the sun without stressing that a dog will eat them, maintenance will  become a lot easier. I can apply Zote soap to stains, scrub on the washboard, and then throw everything in the wash.

The extra time in the sun makes such an incredible difference — a yellowing pillow case looked a bit better when it came out of the washer and was snowy white by the time I brought it back inside!

I left the fridge unplugged until about 9PM, so about five hours. The opposite of riveting 44-page manual said that it could be plugged in immediately and I knew it had not been transported horizontally, so that was really an over abundance of caution on my part. Before plugging it in, I gave it a wash inside and out with a solution of water with vinegar and a few drops of dish soap, but only used water and vinegar for the inside of the water dispenser tray and the dispenser mechanism itself. The inside had a “new fridge smell” that was incongruent with the outside appearance and the wash really help get rid of that plasticky scent. I set both the freezer and fridge controls to “óptim,” filled the ice cube and water dispenser trays and went to bed hoping the ruckus the fridge was making was only the compressor firing up.

Yesterday morning, the fridge was dead silent. I did a quick search on “digital inverter compressors” and learned about this new (and rather awesome) fridge compressor technology that means that fridges are quieter and more energy efficient. An RV fridge is entirely silent and I have a hard time getting used to the hum of a fridge in the background, so this is yet another lovely bonus feature!

By late morning, I trusted the fridge enough to transfer the contents of the old one over and was champing at the bit to get groceries, but had no time. It was going to be a stupidly long day, something I am so over and which I hope will not repeat itself again. I fired a client this week, something that has been a long time coming that will allow me to provide better service to my other much better paying clients and free up a couple of hours a day. So maybe I will succeed in my goal of a more “normal” schedule starting in January.

The last two weeks, water delivery was at 4:30, so of course the doorbell rang at 3:30 yesterday just as a client Skyped in for training! But, hey, I’m not complaining. Better early than not at all! I’m so glad I have the water delivery worked out. I go through about a gallon a day (as I go through 2 x 5 gallons in 10 days), depending on how much I’m cooking things that need water, like rice or pasta. So a jug a week means I never risk running out.

Today was rather like Christmas continuing to come early as I got two Amazon packages delivered rather than just the one I expected. I don’t know if this applies to shipping to Canada, but Amazon.com now has extraordinarily good shipping rates to Mexico and super fast transit times! I still much prefer to shop locally for instant gratification, but if I simply can’t find something, I’m so glad to have both Amazon.com and Amazon.mx as backups. I start with .mx and if they don’t have something, then I look at .com. With everything I’ve shopped for so far, if it was a good price and had free shipping on .mx, it was prohibitively expensive to buy on .com and if it was expensive or unavailable on .mx, then I was going to get a good deal on .com.

As a point of comparison, I really wanted a fancy notebook that would have cost me 50USD to ship to Mexico this summer. That was never going to happen. With the new global shipping program, I’m getting the notebook for 23USD. Wow!

The most pressing thing in my orders was a seven-port USB hub. I have bought I don’t know how many hubs over the years, including several purchased here everywhere from Office Depot to Waldo’s, that have simply not worked. It was getting to be ridiculous so I found the best rated seven-port hub on Amazon and ordered it. This was one of those items that was more affordable on the .mx site and pretty much the same price as if I had bought it in the States on the .com site. So far, it’s working. Yay!

The nice-to-have thing in the same .mx order was a TP-Link WiFi extender to get internet upstairs. It was actually less expensive here in Mexico than it would have been in the US!

This product sounded way too good to be true — almost plug and play, double the original coverage, and only about 25CAD? It took me about five minutes to unbox it, muddle through the technical jargon, determine that the easy method wasn’t going to work, set it up through the nearly as easy secondary method, and go from not being able to download email upstairs to being able to stream Netflix! What a great product!

After working steadily through the afternoon, I finally headed out to get some groceries. I’m still waiting for some PayPal transfers so I couldn’t go and do the huge run I wanted, but I still had a comfortable budget to get some basics that will cover the next several days as well as some little treats for the house. For what I wanted to buy, I chose to go to Bodega Aurrera, but had to nix my plans of walking when it started to torrentially downpour as I was heading out. I’m still pretty sure that I could have walked there faster than drive!

There, I was annoyed to find a pink garage can for my office on a clearance rack — I bought the same model in purple this summer for $20 more. 🙂

I found these adorable and perfectly sized baskets with a woven pattern for my fridge:

There were so inexpensive and the perfect size for my pantry shelves that I am going to go buy several more. I may even shake things up and get a few in the lime green! 🙂

(No, I have not started drinking Coco-Cola. The pizza places keep ignoring my requests for them to not bring it even though it’s included! I gave one to my mecanico neighbour and keep forgetting to pass him these.)

By the way, my fridge was on sale at Bodega… for $7,999 ($1,000 less than new full price at Coppel). They also had the just over $5,000 nine-cubic-foot Daewoo I’d seen on Coppel’s site and my Mabe washer for $1,000 more. I was going to stop at Bodega on my way to Coppel and if I had, I might have made a disastrous mistake!

Last thing to show off is that I’ve been super annoyed with the grey hand towels for my bathroom, but replacing them wasn’t a priority until I found these for just $20 each!

There is getting to be way too much turquoise and matchy-matchyness in the house, a trap I fell into with Miranda, so I made sure to get a cheap plastic pitcher for dishwashing rinse water in a colour that I don’t have in the rest of the house. 🙂 That turquoise is everywhere right now and must be the colour of the season. Contessa would be heaven. 😉

It’s funny how a fridge that works as it should and a washing machine have so magically transformed my life and exponentially increased my enjoyment of my new home. It felt magical this morning to be able to pop my favourite dress (and a few other pieces) in the wash and to have them all clean and dry by the time I was ready to head out. Soon, the fridge will be full of everything I need to make a myriad of healthy dishes with ingredients sourced from all the specialty shops in my neighbourhood and nearby. Slowly, but surely, I am inching my way to the life I envisioned I would build for myself in this house!