Oven

Tis Monday. I’d do a “not me” but I can’t remember all the funnies to put into it this week. I’ve had too many headaches. Remember the ‘water’ headaches I mentioned? Well, I don’t think they are from water. I’ve had one nearly every day for hmmmm…. too long. I can’t think right now. I am however going to attempt to see a chiropractor soon and hopefully that will help.

Anyway, I miss having an oven. I didn’t really fully explain what happened with ours did I? Well, one day last week I thought I’d be oh-so-smart and do my baking in the evening. I don’t know why this seemed like such a good idea to me other than the fact that I hadn’t been able to get it done in the mornings or afternoons for some reason. Ha! So I set up the bread machine to do my dirty work for me around dinner time and I was going to pop the loaves in the oven a couple of hours later. Things went as planned except I kinda forgot about the loaves while they were rising so they got a little bigger than usual. Not a problem though. Nothing in this world was bound to save those loaves from the oven of doom!

Just about the time I was going to pop the loaves in, I heard Ella crying, “Mum-mum, Mum-mum!” It just wrings my heart when she cries my name. 🙂 She’s been teething so has a harder time getting to sleep. So I put the oven on to pre-heat and asked Stu to stick the pans in in a couple of minutes. Ella calmed down quickly and I came back to watch more of “Miss Potter.” Have you seen that movie?! If not, you should. Really! And a few minutes more I started smelling “bread smell” only it went quickly to “burnt bread smell” which is not pleasant. I rushed to the oven and flicked the light on to find 4 very black loaves of bread in the oven. I turned it off as fast as can be and tried to pull them out without burning myself.

Meanwhile the house filled with smoke and the detectors started buzzing. Ugh! I turned on the fans and opened the windows trying to get some of the smoke and smell out of the house. I was also watching the oven waiting for it to go “off.” It’s a gas oven/range, and I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it since we’ve known each other. Cooking on gas hasn’t been something that I’d had a lot of experience with. So I kept my eyes on it, but it didn’t seem to be going off like usual. Eventually I mentioned it to Stu and as we both stood in the kitchen pondering the problem the kettle which had been on top in the middle, on a trivet, started to whistle. Uh-oh! That meant that the oven was REALLY hot!!! Stuart went outside and turned off the gas at the tank since we couldn’t figure out what else to do.

The next day Stu took the oven to get fixed. Unfortunately the ‘fix it” guy called back to say that “there was nothing wrong with it. It ran fine for him” which is not very comforting to me when something was very obviously wrong with it while it was here. Stuart insisted that there WAS something wrong with it and that they’d better check it again, so they did. The guy who had been on vacation came back to work at the place and whipped them into shape and they finally figured out what was going on and hopefully it’s now fixed.

Anyway, not having it has helped me realize how much I like to have an oven. Ha! I’m so spoiled, I know! We have plenty of means of cooking without it, but I’m picky about my bread loaves, don’t care for their shape out of the machine, and I like to be able to cook things on the stove top and bake in the oven. 🙂 I used to think I would have loved to live as a pioneer, but now I know that I probably wouldn’t have been very good at it since it involved so much hard work! Ha ha ha!