sparkling miracle

Corrie is on the telephone with me telling me about a new invention that has changed her life--the countertop dishwasher. It sounds, from her description, like one of those fabled kitchen technologies that is sufficiently advanced and handy as to be indistinguishable from Mary-Poppins-magic! Corrie proclaims that it is the best $170 she has ever spent in her life.

So, this raises the question--how much could the countertop dishwasher have cost, and it still would have been the best $x Corrie had spent in her life. Corrie begins to answer this question by noting that the single best purchase she has ever made in her life was her air conditioner, for which she paid $350 and which has made her happier than anything else on Earth (except for Scrabble, which is a gift from God and therefore free). She goes on to speculate that the countertop dishwasher would still have been the best $200-$225 she ever spent had it cost that much, but if it had been $250 then she would have to choose using that amount of money to buy 5/7th of the dishwasher.

Corrie also asks me why it is that I have a weblog and why I am typing into it while I talk on the telephone. I had no answer for this, except assurances that I'm not like some of those other, hideously self-indulgent bloggers out there. I forgot to tell her my whole spiel about How Weblogs are The Future.