Last night I launched a beautiful pepperoni pizza into my Model P electric pizza oven. Seconds later the thermal glass inside the door exploded. The pizza was fine. I briefly considered brushing off the glass and eating it anyway. Common sense returned. Barely.

This was not my only appliance casualty this month. The ice maker in our two-year-old refrigerator gave out. Two closet lights died in the same week, different closets, same blown ballast. It became clear that this was just the house asserting itself. Then my coffee grinder blew an internal fuse. Three years of pour-overs, silent.

I have no real way of determining whether I got my money's worth from any of it. I know what things cost. I know how long they lasted. I don't know how to weigh that against forty great pizzas, or the ice at my daughter's birthday party, or the particular quiet of a morning that starts with a good grind. There's no framework for this. There's only the sting of loss and the urge to replace.

“The line between meaningful investment and mindless upgrade spending is blurry because they feel the same.”

The New England part of me, the part that exclusively wears L.L. Bean in his imagination, is staring longingly at the Ooni Karu. Wood-fired, multi-fuel, built like something that survives a generation. Also: no glass panel through which thermal stress can shatter my Friday night.

But I recognize the other version of this story, where "invest in quality" is cope with a credit card. Where the emotional response to losing something is to escalate, not evaluate. The purchase soothes something the purchase won't actually fix.

My daughter saw the glass. She asked what happened. I said it broke. She said "can we get a new one". That's the obvious next step, from where she's sitting. I don't want to model the thing where you hold onto broken objects out of stubbornness. But I also don't want to model the thing where loss has no friction, where the answer is always the next thing.

The Ooni might be the right call. The correct time to make it is not forty-eight hours after glass exploded on my pizza.

I'm sitting with it. Mostly because the pizza was really good and I'm not ready to let that go yet either.