THE WASHER IS HERE. LET US DANCE WITH JOY.

Okay, so buying a washer online, sight unseen, didn't work after all.

I happened to check my email a few hours after ordering, only to find an email from Home Depot saying that my card was declined so my order would be canceled.

Normally, see, this would be totally believable. I assume that my credit will be bad in any and all circumstances. (I even get nervous paying with cash. Seriously--as I wait in line at Wal-Mart, bills in hand, I worry that they won't take them. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Our local deli once posted a sign that they would no longer accept any bills over $20 in size. You can't even count on cash any more.)

Back to the washer. The card should actually have been fine, because we weren't using our card. We were using Fred's work card, with the plan of paying it back as soon as the bill came in.

Much discussion and several phone calls later, it turned out that although the credit card company did indeed have the transaction on record and did plan to charge us for a washing machine from Home Depot, HD itself had no intention of bringing us a washing machine. Apparently, when you order online, if it takes more than thirty seconds for the transaction to complete, their system decides you are scum and doesn't finish the transaction.

At the point in the conversation with Home Depot where Fred figured this out, he turned to me and said, "You want to just cancel this and go and buy one in person?" So we did. Emergency child care call to Grandma and we went.

And we did everything the old-fashioned way. I have no idea what the user reviews are for this washer. I did not check Consumer Reports. The sales guy showed it to us and said it was a good one, and it was marked down by $250 because it was ever so slightly used. Somebody returned a set, washer and dryer, supposedly because they wanted a different color. So we bought the washer, loaded it into the van because they don't do delivery on used items, and brought it home.

I must say, not knowing the user reviews is kind of nice.

This thing is a front-loader. I had not even checked those before, because although they are apparently the latest thing in home washers, they are more expensive than top-loaders. And they can have mold issues because they seal so tightly.

The guy at the store said that we should dry off the rubber seal and the door after a load, then leave the door open for at least 1/2 hour to let it dry, to prevent mold. Being paranoid, I just leave the door swinging open on ours all the time it's not actually in use. It's not very pretty that way, but maybe it won't get moldy.

And this washer IS kind of cool. The front lights up like the panels in a cockpit. There's a cool soap and fabric softener dispenser. It's a 4.0, so it holds a lot.

I like it. I'm happy.

Buying the old-fashioned way worked out, at least so far. But my three hours spent trying to buy one online were not wasted. I learned a lot about washers. I knew what the guy in the store meant when he said, for example, that "people return this model a lot because they don't like not being able to set the water level." So the store buying process went really fast.