Saturday 17 July 2010

"Is this a Dad invention?"

The electrician is standing there looking at the oven. He arrived, in his lunch break, to look at it. My father made the cupboard it sits in. There is a flap at the top that you pull down to get out the baking trays etc. I keep the baking trays in the oven.
There are two reasons for this. One is that I am too short to reach the space easily. (Okay 5' AND half an inch for those of you who must know.) The other is that the flap kept banging down and hitting me on the head. It almost hit the electrician in the face when he pulled the oven out to investigate. His question indicates he knows my father quite well. My father "invents" things. He designs things. They frequently need to be redesigned. He is, after all, a magician. Magicians lead unnecessarily complex lives. I do not do magic.
So, I stand there and hold the flap up and the electrician investigates. It seems that the oven is inter-dependent on the clock. The clock has disintegrated inside. No new clocks are available.
He can by pass the clock so that I can heat things "but you really can't cook anything in it" because "the thermostat is a bit wonky and I can't get one of those either". He also had to take the door off to get at the control panel and the spring on one side hashad it.
"You know," he tells me, "I really think you need a new oven."
Oh. Well, he tried. I give him a jar of marmalade and remind him that we would like to have his bill this time. Last time my father ended up ringing his wife and saying, "Isn't it time he sent us a bill?"
After he had gone I still managed to produce food for eleven adults. When the others returned from their very nice day out we transported over to my sister's place and used her oven to heat things. She has a lot more space for entertaining anyway.
Now, if anyone has thoughts on ovens I will be interested.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

When we first moved to Australia, our oven (rented house) broke down during the cooking of the Christmas lunch! It was impossible to get repaired during the holiday season and so we struggled to cook for nearly three weeks. (Chocolate replaced pretty much everything!)

My suggestion is buy BIG! I now have a large 6 ring stove and long oven and I love it.

Sarah Tokeley said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sarah said...

Apologies Cat, the above deletion was me.

My original comment said hello to you. I've just finished reading all your archives. I also said hello to Donna as I've just finished reading all hers too!

Now, I will go back to my writing :-)

Sarah

Rachel Fenton said...

Donna - I would love an oven like that but there is something too proletariat about me to justify it! Also, it doesn't help that I live in an itsy house with and ickle kitchen! But our stove didn't work when we bought the house and had to get another one straight away - straight away turned out to be a month later! I think the stoves in NZ are awful! In the UK I had a gas oven in my first house and it was brilliant but then switched to electric fan for my second and I got the knack of that, too, so it's a matter of getting the one which suits your needs. It's the grill thing which gets me. I want to have the option of using the grill separately but separate grills are often small. Decisions!

catdownunder said...

Yes, I want a separate grill - this one has a separate grill. I actually use a vertical grill to grill things but I need a horizontal grill for the cheese on toast etc...
Donna you mean you actually stayed here without an oven? I think I would have been high tailing it home!
Hello Sarah - nice to 'meet' you - purr!