Cooking Something Up with Me

So, we spent about ten months of this past year without a stove in our kitchen.

Oh, the stove was there, all right.  It just didn't work.

We have been making do with the downstairs stove, which is not as nice, and, being down the stairs and three blocks to the right, not as convenient.

Whenever we cooked, we tried to think of everything we might need from the other floor and carry it with us before we started.  But it never worked quite as well as we'd hoped.

I'd start mixing up a cake in the upstairs kitchen, and I would have to send a child down to the other kitchen for eggs, where my husband had relocated the ingredients he was most likely to use when he cooked.  No sooner would that child come up with the eggs than I would have discovered on the recipe that I also needed oil, which had also been relocated to the kitchen where my husband did most of the cooking.  So I'd send a child for the oil.  Then I'd send another child to help the child find the oil, the right oil, the oil I mean, the one I need for cake.

Then, I'd open the drawer for the rubber scraper, only to find that pretty much every utensil had been carried downstairs for possible use down there.

THIS is why we had so many children, if you really want to know.

I could have started mixing the cake downstairs, but then I would have to send children upstairs for the mixer and the cocoa.  And the sugar.  And flour.

Whenever the rest of us were doing something upstairs while my husband cooked downstairs, he started to feel like an indentured servant, relegated to the servant's quarters to slave away for our family dinner.

People, this was our life. For something like ten months.

Finally, we had the money together to buy a new stove.  We went to three stores to compare prices and features, then came back to the first one.  We made our purchase and waited two more weeks for delivery.  The morning the stove was supposed to arrive, Paul and the kids hauled dishes and utensils upstairs.

We were all excited.

Only after--of course--the delivery guys hauled out our old stove, did we discover that the new stove did not work, either.  The delivery guys had the foresight to plug it in and test it.

The clock came on, but the burners and oven did not heat up.

"This stove is defective," he announced.  "We'll send it back and order you a new one."

We wondered if we could get some kind of upgrade for our trouble.

The answer was no.

So, we waited another week for our new stove.  This time, with a big hole in our kitchen.  We couldn't even use the stove for extra counter space, as we had become accustomed, because both the old one and the new one had both been hauled away.  And I had to learn to use the alarm clock I didn't like instead of the stove timer to wake me up in the morning.  Weird, I know.  But it got me up and far away from bed.

Half of the items that had been hauled upstairs were taken back downstairs by the children who had not already been worn out by hauling items on previous trips.

Another week passed, and, at the very end of the day, here came another team of delivery men delivering an identical twin to our other new stove.

So identical that it didn't work, either.  The clock came on, but the burners and oven didn't warm up.

"It's getting warm," he announced, his hand flat on the dark burner.  I put my own hand on. Not!

The delivery guy and I looked at each other and suddenly knew that the first stove had not been defective.

"Something's wrong with your electricity," he said.  So we ran downstairs to check the breaker.  The switches for the stove were both on.  He turned them off.  They would not go back on.  He tried to push them and reported that they wouldn't go back on.  "That means something's wrong with your electricity," he said.

As we came back upstairs, I thought about the episode of my favorite television show where Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) asks her electric man to make sure her electricity doesn't go to lower-class houses before it comes to hers.  How could something be wrong with our electricity?

I sent an email to the Home Repairs and All-purpose Fix-it Patriarch, my brother, who, unbeknownst to me, was just leaving on an out-of-country trip.

My husband and I had a couple of tentative conversations about whether the old stove we hadn't used for almost a year was even broken?  We concluded that it was.  Anything else would just be too heartbreaking to contemplate.

I had shared my stove problem with the woman I stand next to in the gym while we blow-dry our hair and put on our faces.

When I told her something was wrong with our electricity, she told me her last boyfriend had been an electrician, and it would probably cost us hundreds of dollars more to get the electricity fixed.  She also told me a horror story about an electrical problem she had just had fixed in her new house, and how much that had cost.

The next time my son visited, I told him our story.  I also told him about my sent email.

"Mom," he said, patiently.  "I have a master's degree in that."

After several more days of running the children up and down the stairs while we waited for our son to get free from some pressing personal business he had to take care of, our son came.

He pulled out our beautiful, worthless new stove and tested the electricity behind it with his thing-a-ma-jig.  "Both wires work," he announced.

We went downstairs to the breaker box.  I told him what the delivery guy had said and showed him the switches doomed to sit in the middle as they would not go on again.

I'm telling you what.  It's a good thing he has a master's degree.

He pushed the switches ALLTHEWAY to the off position and ALLTHEWAY to the on position, and, voila!

A working stove in the kitchen.

In less than a year.