In the anxiety-riddled night before today's election, I decided to bask in the glow of a little retail therapy. Which is tough to do when you don't have extra money to spare but, hey, it's the little things in life, amirite? Just because you're web-shopping doesn't mean that you actually have to buy something.

Except when you do.

As I mentioned on Sunday, I've not had a working oven for months. Since the end of June, I think. I've always had it in my head that I'll make do with my air fryer and toaster oven until a compelling enough deal on an oven comes along. In other words, I want a good-quality mid-priced oven at a low-priced cost. And that usually means snagging a Black Friday deal, though I think I've historically gotten my best appliance deals on President's Day for some reason.

So while I had no plan to purchase anything, I started looking at various sites to see what model I might want to get if it ended up on sale.

And lo-and-behold, Home Depot had a "Special Buy" price of $750 on a $1,100 model that I would never purchase if not for the fact that the sale price was only $50 over than the high end of my $650-$700 budget (which ain't all that much given the cheapest models hover around $500).

And so... money be damned, I bought it. They're bringing it on Thursday.

Never mind that I had to spend an additional $40 for a new power cable to get my "free" installation, plus another $50 to have my junked oven hauled away... I'll be able to bake again, and that's what matters.

To be honest, I don't think oven I bought is worth $1,099 because it's pretty basic. I think they priced it that high just so they could create a "Special Buy" to get people to think it's this massive bargain they can't pass up. It does have "Air Fry" and "Air Baking" modes (like most ovens do now-a-days), which is nice I guess. But the big feature they tout is "No Preheat" technology, which is kind of silly because I've never preheated an oven in my entire life, and my air fryer already did this (an air fryer I'll probably still use because it's small, gives perfect results, and uses less energy than an oven). But other than that? Eh. I can cook stuff with it.

My old oven (which is comparable to this one and cost $600) lasted 8-1/2 years.

Which, to be honest, is 3-1/2 years longer than I expected, given how everything is built to be replaceable instead of being built to last any more.

I had toyed with the idea of getting it repaired because it's probably just an element gone bad, but the oven suffered some major damage almost immediately when my mom with dementia got confused and cooked plastic in it. I managed to eventually get it all scraped and scrubbed off, but doing so destroyed the finish of the oven box which made it impossible to keep clean. Spills never wiped off... they fused to the metal interior no matter how quickly you tried to remove them. Which hasn't been a fun way to cook for all these years. I lived in fear of grease spatter and drips. Hopefully my new oven will manage to stay cleaner longer.

And so... now I'm poor.

But at least I'll be able to bake bread again, because trying to do that in a toaster oven hasn't been great.