The pot holder fiasco

Why is it that, every once in a while, one's possessions spontaneously band together and stage an insurrection? This is happening with all my pot holders. For months, probably a year, who knows, longer,  I have enjoyed the trusty support of three, a once-pretty and slightly pricy pair made by April Cornell, and a solo known as Roo*ster that was an extraordinarily economical investment at Wal-Mart. They were all carefully chosen and hard-won. Who would have thought that finding presentable (by which I mean, "not so ugly that I can't bring myself to use them") and reasonably functional (by which I mean "don't allow the heat through and are flexible enough to wrap securely around hot objects") pot holders could be such a chore? The 'net and the world of kitchen accoutrements are full of inadequate versions, starting with the classy but ridiculously expensive:

the ridiculously unappealing, and the ridiculously heat-penetrable, sometimes combined in a single model (but one of an awesome number of examples to choose from):

the ridiculously impractical (white? really?)

and the just plain ridiculous

Alas, good old reliable Roo*ster is on its last legs. It isn't obvious from this angle, but the business side, with its heat-resistant silver cloth, doesn't look so good.  I think one more trip to the washing machine and that will be the end.

 

A once pleasantly bright and flowery April Cornell twin died an inglorious death recently, after accidentally being exposed to very hot grease right out of the oven (but my hand was fine, which of course is the whole point), followed shortly thereafter by an undignified explosion of its fluffy insulating guts. The remaining sibling is also losing integrity there along the upper left border. And what you can't see quite as easily is the apparently permanent incorporation of melted cheese (now weirdly hard like plastic) in the opposite corner and the other side. I fear it too will spontaneously burst apart upon contact with something too hot. 

So given Chicago's unendingly inclement weather, I started an earnest search for replacements on the computer. Upon querying "pot holder" on everybody's first on-line shopping go-to, Amazon.com, I got highly useful returns such as this:

 

Apparently their definition of "pots" is broad.

Or perhaps a too punny.

In the end, I found a pretty new April Cornell pair on that other shopping mainstay, eBay:

But, given my history, I'm not secure with just two pot holders at a time, so I kept looking until I came across another that greatly appealed to my well-documented feelings about bear country at the unlikely merchandiser of Blains Farm & Fleet (thank you Google, for turning them up):

Neither has arrived; both were ordered an unseemly number of days (like 10) ago and both were shipped USPS. The storied United States Postal Service is, for reasons you can easily imagine (e.g., it's associated with the government), notoriously susceptible to the vicissitudes of weather, and we most certainly have had lots and lots of vicissitudes this winter. Let's hope one pair or the other gets here before total meltdown. Of my remaining pot holders, I mean. This being the first half of February in Chicago, meltdown of the 13 or 14 packed inches of snow on the ground is unlikely until March.