Our new stove is apparently trying to bring about our financial ruin while attempting to kill or disfigure people. Our previous stove was an asshole, too. It was an under-achiever most of its life, never succeeding at the task it was born to do. I’m pretty sure there’s no situation in which it should take a minimum of 45 minutes to bring a pot of water to a boil, unless you are using a Bic lighter as a heat source.
Our old stove was electric, which I’ve always hated, so we opted for a gas stove this time around. That meant we needed to have a gas line run to our kitchen. People who had done this before told me that it cost them between $200 and $300 for this service since they already had a gas line somewhere else in their house (as do we). So you can imagine the heart attack I nearly had when the first guy to come out and give us an estimate told us it would be $1,000. The next guy quoted us $800. I have no idea what the third guy’s estimate was. He spent about 30 minutes longer here than the other guys, took a bunch of pictures, drew a couple of sketches, and coughed uncontrollably for several minutes at a time. He was about 150 years old and his lungs sounded like they were filled with gravel, and I worried the entire time he was here that he might simply fall over dead. We never heard from him again, which is concerning.
After forking over an insane amount of money for the stove (apparently the “major” in major appliance refers to the hit your bank account will take) and the $800 just to be able to have the stove live here, we realized that our above-the-stove microwave was going to look like crap with the new stove. The colors were different (the microwave was white; the new stove stainless steel), plus the old microwave would look very dated next to the sexy young stove. So we forked over another wad of cash for a new microwave. Then more money was forked over to have them both installed. Somewhere during all of this, it was brought to our attention that an electrical doohickey of some sort was not up to code, so we had to fork over more cash to an electrician so our house wouldn’t burn down.
But it didn’t end there. The outlet the stove plugs into worked just fine for the previous stove, but it’s not compatible with the current one. So there’s now a thick, gray cord with a huge, non-removable safety warning tag stretched across my counter so it can reach an outlet it will play nicely with. Of course, this problem wasn’t detected until after the electrician had come and gone. Which is probably a good thing, because he’s going to have to come back anyway. There’s a smoke detector not far from the stove, and now that there’s an open-flame situation happening in my kitchen, it starts singing the song of its people every time I turn on a burner. The smoke detectors in our house are all linked, so that if one goes off, all the others do, too. So when I try to cook dinner, an entire chorus of smoke detectors starts to perform a concert. To prevent that, my husband had to remove the prima donna from the kitchen, leaving a hole in the ceiling with a lovely tangle of wires dangling out of it. It complements the cord on the counter quite nicely.
But the stove isn’t content with just bleeding us dry financially. It seems out for actual blood. I guess I’m not yet used to cooking under normal heat conditions because last week I heated up a skillet of olive oil and butter and was placing some scallops in to sear when one of them literally leapt out of the pan, splattering my wrist and forearm with hot grease.
But I can finally make pasta in less than an hour. That’s something, I guess.
Range of emotions
Shannon Not Sharon 