let’s play twister, let’s play risk

I just watched REM on Austin City Limits. Well, I watched the last half hour or so, since naturally, even though I’d been reminding myself all evening to watch it at midnight, I managed to forget to turn on the TV till nearly 12:30. Happily they were on for the whole show, and it wasn’t split up between two bands as it often is. REM was my favorite favorite favorite band from my college years until… well, until about 1998 apparently, although I sure thought Monster was the last album by them that I liked. According to Wikipedia, New Adventures in Hi-Fi was after Monster. I suppose they know what they’re talking about. Anyhow, I haven’t cared much for their albums in the past ten years. I didn’t like Up and I honestly can’t remember if I even ever bought Reveal – how sad is that? I did download their latest one, Accelerate, though, and it has grown on me. 

Anyhow. It was fun seeing REM. And they played several older songs that I loved. Losing My Religion, Man On The Moon, Electrolite. I miss them. I was a little alarmed at how old Michael Stipe is looking, though. Especially since he’s only a year or so older than I am.

The parents came up today. We have to get a new stove, since our oven quit working, oh, LAST SUMMER. But, hey, no rush on getting a replacement! The eyes still work – well, sort of, most of them still work. One of them is even level, and doesn’t make everything in the pot slosh to one side. And we have a microwave and a little George Foreman grill, so it isn’t like we’ve been starving without an oven. I’ve missed it, though. Not as much as I miss Michael Stipe, but enough that I’m really ready to get a new one. And the only reason we haven’t gotten one is that our current oven is… weird. Its weirdness goes far beyond the whole "I’m an avocado green appliance from 1969!" thing. It’s not your normal sits-on-the-floor stove. It’s kind of built into the cabinet. There’s a strip of wood at the bottom where normal stoves have a pots and pans drawer, and it doesn’t fit against the wall – there’s another strip of wood between the wall and the stove. If that makes sense, and I’m sure it doesn’t. The long and short of it is that some cutting out of the original is going to be required. So we’ve just put off doing anything about it, being the kind of people who never rush headlong into anything that’s going to require any sort of work, especially when we don’t know what we’re doing.

Well, here’s a visual:

Yes, our whole kitchen is ugggggggggly! And yes, that tile would put your eyes out. And yes, the kittens seem to have found something fascinating in the floor. I would like to note that the part of the stove under the weird dials is NOT nasty, though. It just looks nasty. It’s the light.

My now-ex-boss’s mother had the same kind of stove in her 1960s house, and she cut hers out herself with a hacksaw. Of course, according to D she did a very poor job and it looks awful, but still. You’d think if a 75 year old woman could try it, we could too, but no. We had to wait for my daddy to come help us out. Because he at least used to be good at stuff like this. Now he can direct us. I hope.

Today was just a scouting trip, though, because even though we’ve had this house ten years and he’s been up here a gazillion times, he’d apparently never paid enough attention to the stove to even know what I was talking about when I tried describing the problem (imagine that! And my description of the problem is just so crystal clear) so he had to come look at it himself. And then we had to go to Lowes to walk fifteen miles and look at the cutting-stuff-apart tools. And at the stoves. Which are actually called "ranges". And aren’t too horribly expensive if you aren’t after anything fancy. I just want one that cleans itself. Since I’ve already demonstrated that I’m never going to do it.

So now he kind of knows what we need to cut it out with, and thinks my brother may have one of the cutting-stuff-apart tools but isn’t sure. It’s a kind of cool gadget – it looks sort of like an electric screwdriver and it has a bunch of interchangable bits that do stuff like polish things and grind things up and cut things apart. It didn’t look nearly big enough to cut a stove out of the cabinet, but if I was in charge I’d assume you needed something like a chainsaw for that. So it’s a very good thing I’m not in charge.

We also discovered that Lowes will give us a rebate for delivery if we buy a stove that costs more than $397 (by a happy concidence, the one I want is $398) and they’ll haul off the old one. Daddy was intending to bring MonsterTruck up, but with the astronomical price of gas (it’s 3.99 in Asheville, 3.87 here – usually we’re way higher than they are) it makes way more sense to let Lowes do it. Even if they didn’t give us a rebate. The gas would probably be more than the stove.

SO we’re still ovenless, but not for too much longer. I think the plan is for them to come back up whenever we can get it delivered – probably in a couple of weeks since my teeny little baby nephew is GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL next weekend – and the hacking out will begin.

They stayed until around 3:30. I think my father would have liked to stay longer, but my mother obsesses over getting home after dark. So at noon she was already asking every three seconds how long it took to get up here and what time they’d be leaving to go home and stressing that she wanted to get home before dark. And no matter how many times we told her it doesn’t get dark till nine and they could stay till five and still be home hours before dark, she would not quit worrying about it. She did that last time they came up too. She also worries about the cats running out of food.

After they left, I tried to read the paper, fell asleep on the couch, and slept till six. Then I drove over to Blowing Rock and walked up Flat Top and took ten zillion pictures because it was a beautiful clear day and the light was just gorgeous. So I’ll leave with some Flat Top pictures.

And apologies for my ghastly spelling. For some bizarre reason this computer isn’t doing the little-red-line-thing under my many misspelled words, even though it always has in the past,  and although I KNOW it has a word processing program, I can’t find it. I’m using Baker B’s computer, which I don’t usually use because I prefer to lie on the couch with the laptop. Anyhow, I’m sure I’m spelling every other word wrong, but oh well!