The return of the oven!

Our oven works! Well, sort of. The part that was replaced today wasn't exactly the correct part. We received a 30V AC motor instead of a 12V DC motor for the oven door lock mechanism. Apparently the manufacturer switched them out sometime during the production run of the oven, and they sent the new part for the new ovens instead of the old part for the old ovens. The repairman was able to wire the thing in well enough that the oven was tricked into believing that the door lock was functional and all features of the oven work now except for the self clean cycle. So, yet again, we have a part on order, which is a bit of a disappointment. But the good news is that we can bake and bake and bake all we want until the proper motor arrives. You'd better believe that we threw some of those little frozen pizzas in there after our trip to the gym! Tomorrow night is dinner at church, but I'm already thinking of all the tasty oven cooked meals that we can make on Thursday and Friday night!

In other news, Errol was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer this morning. Poor little guy. He let us know by leaving the most disgusting stool EVER right before I left for work. Blech. He is expected to recover and is showing no other signs of being sick, so don't get too terribly worried about him quite yet. :)

Our little maestro

We should have named him Ludwig...

Quite the construction project

This is going to be a little difficult to document, so try and use your imagination a bit here. We had a week or so of relatively windless weather, which is rather unusual around here. During that week, we watched a spider build a pretty amazing web. Here's a picture of part of the back of our house:


The spider web stretched from that birch tree on the left over to the deck on the right side of the picture! The main part of the web was located about 90% of the way from the tree to the deck. It was anchored to the deck and the post supporting the deck in a couple of places. It was also anchored to the grass below the web. The most impressive part was that there was one super long strand of web stretching all the way over to a branch on the birch tree! We couldn't believe it when we saw it, and we have no idea how the spider managed to do it. Here are some more pictures of the spider's project:

The strands on the left join together about halfway to the tree
and it's just one strand the rest of the way

Another shot of the main portion of the web by the deck

The little artist

Unfortunately, we had to destroy the web after a few days to mow the lawn. The spider got back to work building a new web in a different area of the yard the next day.

New Plates, New Plates!

Alright, so I admit that I may be a little overexcited about my new dinnerware, but take a look at them, they're soooooo gorgeous!!!

Why yes, they are all different!

We've been eating off some el-cheapo IKEA plates for the last three years, and they're starting to look a bit gross. Icky silverware marks are appearing all over them and they have starting developing many chips on the corners. Since we only invested a grand total of somewhere between $36 and $48 (we can't quite remember if each piece was 50 cents or $1) on the 12 dinner plates, 18 cereal bowls, and 18 salad plates, we didn't feel too bad about replacing them with something better. Perhaps some Craigslist reading college student will give them a new home.

So appetizing... not

We've been seeking new dinnerware for a few months now, and I came across these funky plates a couple of months ago. We both decided they were totally impractical and that they'd never fit in the dishwasher for day-to-day use, but I left them on my spreadsheet. Oh yes, you'd better believe there's a dinnerware spreadsheet, people! We make spreadsheets for all of our major purchases, because we're nerds like that. Anyway, my heart gave a little flutter every time I looked at the picture of them, and I finally decided we should just get them and then we could use them for decorations on our normally rather dull looking dining room table, and then once in a while, we'd make a nice dinner at home and use them for that. We'll probably get them out for little tiny dinner parties, too. I only got the six place settings. I'm still seeking some cool chargers or placemats to put under them, as well as a centerpiece that will coordinate, but those can wait for another day. We're also missing a couple of pieces that didn't make it into the shipping box, so hopefully we'll get that straightened out soon. There are actually four pieces in each of the six patterns, but they look nicer with three stacked than with four.



We've pretty much settled on another pattern to buy for our new daily use dinnerware, but I'm not nearly as excited about those. They're cool, but more plainly shaped for ease of installation in the dishwasher. We'll get around to ordering those pretty soon, but don't hold your breath for a post on them. :)

I'm so 80s

Today was our fall session of our church's semi-annual Serve and Celebrate community service. We were actually scheduled to do projects all over the city last Saturday, but only half of the projects got to happen that day because of all the rain we received and all of the flooding around town. So, quite a few were rescheduled for today, which turned out to be a great day for it. We had about 800 volunteers working this time, and another local church joined with us this time as a way to celebrate their 100th anniversary.

We spent the morning working on painting a house. I didn't get any pictures of us doing the job because we were pretty busy the whole time. Jeff and I started with a decorative iron grape vine themed support (very appropriate given our beverage tastes), then I moved on to a lamp post while Jeff started working on gutters. I joined in on the lower gutters while he continued to work his way around the house. Everything took at least two, and sometimes three coats of paint. We had about 15 people total working on the house this morning, and there will be more showing up to finish the job this afternoon. I think we probably could have lasted longer on the job, but my lovely brother, Nathan, is planning to stop by for a visit this afternoon. I also managed to bruise my backside rather severely earlier this week at our church picnic (hamburger grease + linoleum = butt hitting the floor), so I was ready to call it a day after completing the morning shift.

On the drive home, I noticed how very 80s my outfit today was. Fluorescent yellow shirt (all the volunteers have these), tapered to the ankle jeans, and artfully paint splattered sneakers. Totally rad!

Horizon to Horizon

We were treated to a lovely full rainbow (double in places) over the house tonight:

Here's the left side...

and here's the middle...

and finally, the right side!

I had to get a close-up of the pretty colors.

I'll have you all know that I walked across the street barefoot and in my pajamas to get these shots. Luckily none of the neighbors were out to stop me for a chat. :)

Chocolate Dessert Cakes

It's been quite a while since we last posted a recipe. So, here's an easy dessert that we make when we don't want to have dessert on hand for days on end. It makes four little personal sized ooey gooey fudge cakes. We use ramekins to make ours, and we usually have a bit of ice cream on top to cool them off when we eat them straight from the oven (or as is the case today, toaster oven). The recipe is from "The Instant Cook" by Donna Hay.

Chocolate Dessert Cakes

185g (6 oz) butter, melted
1 cup caster (superfine) sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
1 1/4 cups plain (all-purpose) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup cocoa
vanilla bean ice-cream or thick (double) cream to serve

1. Preheat the oven to 160 deg C (320 deg F).

2. Place the butter, sugars and eggs in a bowl and mix until combined.

3. Sift over the flour, baking powder and cocoa and mix until combined.

4. Place in four 1 cup (8 fl oz) capacity ovenproof tea or coffee cups and bake for 20 minutes or until fudgy.

5. Serve warm or cold in the cups topped with some ice-cream or cream.

Makes four generous portions. (You could easily divide this into five or six cups.)

Another project crossed off the list!

I knocked another task off of our list of Long Overdue Projects tonight. The guest bedroom curtains have been hemmed to the proper length! I figured I had better go ahead and do that while I still had all my sewing equipment out. It only took an hour, which seemed just a little bit too easy, since I've been putting if off for about four years now.

Why yes, those ARE Wizard of Oz teddy bears on the window sill... this is Kansas, after all!

Jeff called the guy who originally did our landscaping earlier this week to ask about our sump pump drain problems as well as to ask if maybe he could help us figure out what to do about a couple areas of the planting beds that need a bit of help. The guy remarked that he had driven by our house a few times in the last year and agreed that we could definitely use a bit of advice, LOL! Anyway, there's hope that another one of my long overdue projects, the columbine crazy area of the backyard, might look better in the near future, too.

Stupid oven

The oven repairman came again yesterday, disassembled the oven, replaced the part, and then discovered that the part he replaced wasn't actually the part that was broken. So, he's ordered another part and we get to wait another couple of weeks for it to come in and for him to get us back on his schedule. Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo frustrating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They're done!!!!!!!

The curtains are finally done!!!! I'm so relieved to get that over with. I had yet another setback on Saturday when I discovered that my horizontal stripe wasn't exactly where I was expecting it to be. I threw a bit of a tantrum and tossed some fabric about rather violently, but eventually got over it, and with Jeff's help, decided that the current location of the stripe wasn't so dreadful. Anyway, I spent many hours on Sunday and Monday finishing them, and finally got them hung up at about 9 pm Monday night. We did very much enjoy the near total blackness of the lining last night. Yes, they're a bit wrinkly, I know. I actually ironed them in the basement, but they're so huge that I had to wad them up a bit to get them upstairs and hung up on the rod, and by the time I finished that task, the wrinkles were back. Perhaps I'll get out my steamer and blast them sometime. We still need to tweak the rod into its final resting place, and then the project will be complete! The only thing left to do in our bedroom now is get a sheet for the bed that matches (I'm thinking... white, LOL), and the entire room will be fully decorated. Yay!



Lessons learned:
1. Make panels that are smaller in at least one dimension than the work surface you plan to work on. They were sliding off my huge table in all directions. It was quite difficult to find a spot in our house with a large enough flat surface to lay the panel out flat. Furniture moving was involved.
2. Don't buy so much thread. I bought 3 spools, I used approximately 1/2 spool.
3. Don't expect to remember a number you measured three weeks ago. Write it down. With diagrams. (Hence the mislocated stripe.) Actually, to be fair, I remembered the number accurately, I just didn't remember to apply it twice!