I am having a huge problem getting the right kind of toaster oven.

What I'm talking about is the kind of toaster oven that mounts beneath a cabinet and doesn't take up a bunch of counter space that frankly, just between you and me, I don't have. So far I've struck out at Home Depot (Foster City and San Carlos), Sears (Hillsdale), Williams-Sonoma (Hillsdale and Stanford), Macy's (Hillsdale and Stanford), Best Buy (San Carlos), the Internet (Groversville, NC), and a local restaurant supply store (actually, I haven't been there yet, I just thought of it while I was typing this list, but I fully expect to wander its aisles aimlessly for eight minutes while clerks avoid me).

Why do I want a toaster oven in the first place? Read on, dude. You came to the right place if that is the information you're after. Did you get here through Google?

You see, often times I want to cook a thing that is roughly eight ounces, so it's a waste to heat up my big old standard kitchen oven. I'll have a frozen salmon-puck-in-puff-pastry or something, and putting it in the oven is like parking a skateboard in the middle of an empty hangar. The thing's just sitting there in all this space wondering why in the hell the world is so lonesome, and I'm on the other side of the door wondering if there's any possible way to pipe Hank Williams tunes in for its final moments. I think it costs me like $48.92 to bake up a single serving of something in the big oven, and according to my imagination the same act would cost only $0.08 in a toaster oven. You can see why I want the smaller unit.

If anyone has any way of telling me how I can find a toaster oven which mounts beneath a cabinet, off the countertop, and can be obtained for less than, like, a hundred or so bucks, please use that way. I'll write your name on the thing's window in dry-erase pen for a while after I get it, if this goes down. The last thing my parmesan toasts will see before the great oblivion of my uvula will be your first name, backwards in translucent red, across some grimy glass, above a blackened horizon of crinkled tray-liner foil. Think about it.

XM Radio

So we got this new car, and it's nice to have a new car, because if you've been driving older cars you're not used to that little eep-eep door-unlocker thing that Tom Cruise has probably taken a stand against since he traded his Wonka Chocolate in for The Seven Moods of Sea Monkeys or whatever logical emotional guideline brochure he's hawking now that everyone thinks his brain is made of "celebrity mousse." The new car has all these detachable and foldable/removable seats, and you can wipe it off, and there are all kinds of speakers, and this roof-window thing that lifts very slightly, and it can go on snow if you need it to. We may need it to go on snow during the winter, so this is a worthwhile feature. But the main feature of interest is "XM Radio."

The car comes with "XM Radio," which is a satellite radio service. They have probably fifty channels (I do not remember numbers larger than fifty unless they are a million, but it is unlikely that they are going to base the next "Rain Man" on me) and we set ten of them up immediately. It's great; you get to hear genuinely deep alternative album cuts (by Talk Talk, Boomtown Rats, Echo & The Bunnymen), genuine punk canon (Cro-Mags, DK, OpIvy, Germs, Misfits, MDC), and even obscure bluegrass or early country-western, depending on the channel. Yes, it's all commercial-free. The problem? It's like $13 a month.

I know, I know. Thirteen dollars is not a big splurge, especially when you consider how little it costs Sally Struthers to feed her Chambord habit these days ($257.90/24hrs). But once you get a household going you realize that you pay like $13 a month just to run naked-time mats through the dryer, and that's literally the tip of the iceberg.

I wanted to write more about this, but at the end of the day, I am not going to pay $13/month to listen to "Video Killed the Radio Star." Also, I need to stop typing on the computer and telling people about things I will not pay for. This isn't 1997, dammit.