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First of all, happy birthday to the cats! They’re officially ten years old. Ralph, it’s a good day to die. (He’s so, so skinny…. but he lives for a bite of bacon every morning and there’s no stopping that.)

On with the stove talk.

Lloyd is as intense with stove research as he was with the washing machine. It’s good, because with both options, I don’t really care. It’s function over form for me – I just need something that will get the job done.

However, when Lloyd is enamored with gadget-y features that I have previously admired, then it’s hard to resist. He asked me if I had heard of split ovens. Had I heard of them? I dreamed of them! I think that is a feature I could get on board with, just because I think we would use the smaller oven 95% of the time, and it is slightly more energy efficient. (Less volume to heat up.)

He’s very interested in an induction cooktop, too, because it heats up just the pan – not the element – and so it is very, very efficient. I reminded him that we’ve tried that before, though it was long ago and technology may have worked out some of the bugs. It would also mean that we’d need to get new pans, and I’m irrationally fond of my old pans. (Induction burners need pans with iron in them. Regular stainless steel won’t work – it needs be magnet-friendly.)

No matter. The Busy Season of Summer is coming – Lloyd’s leaving for a conference in New Orleans, Brad arrives next week, then it’s the Sommerer Family Reunion, then Lloyd’s brother and sister are coming up for the Fourth and they’re going on a float trip. (I’m not.) This stove business is going to have to wait a couple of weeks.

I did remember to bring the toaster oven home.

The oven will not be resurrected. Lloyd looked at the panel – the panel we had replaced a few years ago – and here’s the situation.

I didn’t see it either. Here’s a close-up.

See the dark burning under the rectangle on the left? Yeah, this is done.

I’m not in a rush to replace it. The stove top still works, and I have a toaster oven at school. I’ll bring that home tonight. (The lasagna was not good. Mushy, overcooked noodles and I didn’t add enough salt. Bleh. Good thing there’s enough to last us a week.)

On Sunday, I heated up the stove to bake some cookies. It seemed to take forever to heat up, and was at 341 degrees for a looooooong time. I thought time had stopped. I turned it off and turned it back on, and this time it was stuck at 314 degrees. I thought I was on a prank show.

We are pretty sure it’s the control panel, so now we have to decide it it’s worth fixing or not. (It’s been replaced once before.)

We’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I had plans to make lasagna. It seemed like a good time to use that rectangular crock-pot thing.

but…… I ran out of lasagna noodles…..

no worries.

Ha! It’s tomorrow’s dinner. I’ll let you know how it turned out.

A very Happy Father’s Day to all the dads we know, especially Lloyd’s and mine! We are so glad to have you in our lives!

I’ve been trying to assemble some information about my dad and my friend Annette’s dad. They both were born and grew up in Brazil at the same time, though in different places. I have a plan to ask them questions and post the answers, and I thought I’d be much farther along in this process than I am. I’m going with “That’s ok.” 😀

If you’d like to take a peek, look at the menus up above and click on ‘Brazil’. Eventually I will ask and post more information, and I’m trying to assemble the diary entries from my grandfather that my Dad is sending, but I’m having trouble with the links.

Ok, have a great Sunday everyone!

Wednesday was not better. Let’s just leave it at that.

Thursday was more normal, which is a relief. One downside is that my Father’s Day project for the children usually depends on taking photos of the children and sending them to be printed at Wal*Mart, but the store was still closed Thursday for clean-up. Oh, well – I had a work-around and it will all be fine.

What else can I tell you? Not much, really. The plumber hasn’t stopped by the house to evaluate the faucet situation, but honestly, I think there are people with sliiiightly bigger problems right now 😉

Have a good Friday, everyone!

What can I say? Monday was weird, and Tuesday turned out to be even weirder.

I’ve had some mild sickness traveling through my room, and trying to figure out if a child should go home or not it’s a little challenging if it’s not pretty cut and dried. So we went through that, and everybody was also a little excited for the second water play day, and by the end of the afternoon I was just tired. I was home by five, imagine that!

At home, I ate supper, sat on the sofa for a while, and then decided at 7:30 to just go to bed. I was asleep within minutes.

At 10:30, the storm hit. I looked at the weather earlier in the evening and knew that this was going to come, but it was a hail storm immediately – no preamble of rain. it was fierce and fast and caused a lot of damage. Thankfully, not at our house, but Sam’s house and lots of others have holes in their siding. Our Walmart has roof/skylight damage and the inside is messed up (I’ll steal some photos off the internet) and our local trailer park didn’t fare too well. Crops are also smashed, which is heartbreaking. Prayers for everyone would be great. In my little corner, I’m going to deal with some scared, tired and cranky children. (I went to the center at midnight to check on our windows -they’re ok.)

Here’s hoping Wednesday is better.