Of course something would break

Of course we'd have a sudden house issue exactly when we're in the midst of an expensive elective upgrade. On Friday, we noticed the under-cabinet lights flickering in the kitchen while we were preparing lunch. Then this week, we started to notice that the flickering seemed to sync up to when we were running the microwave. And the microwave was sounding a little loud.

It seemed pretty ignorable though. Maybe a weird power draw, yes, but ignorable.

Tonight though, the office power went out when we reheated dinner. Uh...ok this has officially escalated to no-longer-ignorable. The microwave seems to be the culprit:

But, I said, our microwave is pretty new! It can't be the microwave! How long is a microwave supposed to last? Well thanks to this blog, I was able to tell pretty quickly how old the microwave was. Seven years old. To the month. To which I thought, "See? That's too new to need replacing."

Google, however, has other ideas:

Touché, Google. 

And given this last year, let's just say that we're using it a whole lot more than we used to, since we're home and preparing food ALL.THE.TIME.

The problem now appears that the light in the office will no longer turn on, even after we reset all the GFCIs that were tripped. We tried replacing the bulbs just in case those were at fault. But no.

So we're left with a conundrum of whether to buy a microwave or hire an electrician. It seems like the internet agrees that our microwave should not be on the same circuit as other normal things like lamps and outlets, so that might require some electrical work. And this light might be completely busted. D suggested taking the fixture off to test if the wires were still working, but that feels like a step too far in the "leave for a professional" direction. We change fixtures, but only when the circuits are off. Deliberately turning them on to test whether the electricity is flowing is where I draw the line. And so it's a chicken and egg problem: do we call the electrician or replace the microwave?

(For better or worse, we made a decision: new microwave arriving on Monday.)