Sheer awesome

Man, I can't even tell you how much I've missed cooking with gas. I also can't even tell you how much of a piece of shit the old electric stove was - but I'm sure going to try!

So, the stove that Frank left us was probably original to the house. Which means it was installed in the middle of the 80s, and was not exactly pampered, if you know what I mean. For example, to set the clock, we had to hold down the "Clock" button, and then press and hold the up arrow until it reached the time we wanted. Simple enough - provided the clock button actually worked, which, of course, it didn't. I had to lean hard on the clock button and kind of roll my thumb around until it engaged, and then whale away on the up button until the time started to move, and hope that I got the time set before my thumb moved off the sweet spot.

And then there were the burners. Not one of the damn things was even close to level, which meant that pots and pans wouldn't sit flat on the burners. To heat up oil in a pan, for instance, we kept having to turn the handle of the pan to make sure we got an even heat. It also meant that using the wok was an exercise in frustration, as it wouldn't sit flat on the big burner, so we'd get hot spots in different places, depending on which direction the handle was facing.

Also, I had started to notice that things in the oven cooked faster on the right side, closer to the door. Which meant that every time I baked or roasted something, I had to turn the pan halfway through cooking to make sure I got an even cook.

But not anymore! The same guys that hooked up our gas fireplace came back last Wednesday and installed the new gas stove. (I took the old electric crap-pile up to Hartland on Saturday and drove away without a second glance. We would have sold it or given it away, but neither of us really felt comfortable having anyone we knew actually use the damn thing.)

Here's the most awesomest stove in the world, nestled tight up against our favorite Frank-artifact (Fartifact?), the What About Happiness label:



It looks a little different than our old friend, but it's pretty much the same model, just five years newer - and with more glowy lights!



And just to prove that we're using it to make awesome food, here it is baking my world-famous Panko-and-herb sockeye and rosemary potato wedges:



First time using the oven, and rest assured - it kicks ASS. Seriously awesome appliance.

Whew.

Well, after that, anything I post will be a let-down, I'm sure, but I do have some other progress to report, and it's pretty awesome, too.

I was out in the garage on Saturday, putting a cat flap in our bedroom door (that's for the next post, that one is), and my Crazy Neighbour™ came wandering over. Seems like his wife had gone out for the day and he was bored with sitting around the house. So he figured he'd come over and maybe do some work on our place for a while. (Seriously - I didn't ask him. He volunteered. Because, as I may have mentioned, he's crazy.) Well, he took one look at the big mess of concrete where the lamp standard used to be, and that was it: that thing was coming out.

So he brought over a whole mess of tools and started in on it. Well, I couldn't very well stand there and let a guy going through chemotherapy tackle such a big job on his own, so I put my project aside and went out to help.

Now, I realize the picture isn't all that impressive, but let me tell you: there was a full metric shit-ton of concrete underneath that light. It took the two of us the better part of an hour-and-a-half to get it out of the pit and we didn't even break any sprinkler pipes while doing it. When we did get the lump out of the hole, we had to beat it apart with a sledge-hammer to get it small enough to lift into a wheelbarrow. I put most of the rocks we knocked off back into the hole and threw some mud over it:



The pipe sticking out the side is the "conduit" (i.e., sprinkler pipe) that Frank used to run the electrical. And yes, it was FULL of water.

Anyway, emboldened by our success, we turned our attention to the second of the two stumps left when we removed the big cedars from the front of the house. I had actually got the first of the two out the weekend before.

Before:


After:


And yes, I DID break a sprinkler pipe while doing that, but given that there are THREE of them right there, I figure one out of three ain't too bad.

Anyway, we managed to get the bulk of the thing out yesterday, and I went back out and tidied it up this afternoon.

Before:


After:


After all, it's not like we could mow the lawn, given that it was RAINING AGAIN. Seriously - there has not been a single day this entire spring that we could call the relatives and Toronto and laugh at them. (Although, to everyone living in Calgary, I have to still say, HA HA!) We STILL haven't mowed the lawn this year.

Looks like hell, too, but what can we do?

Anyway, I've got more, but it's late, and I want to save a little for the next post. Who knows, maybe I'll post something in the middle of the week! Oooh! Tricky!

A little bit of everything, including the kitchen sink

I was getting flack from certain unnamed sources (*cough* War Department *cough*) about not including pictures in my last post. Never mind that I really like the post as it was, and thought it was funnier and stronger for being somewhat deliberately vague, oh no: it's not a real post without pictures, apparently.

You'd think she didn't like my stories or something. (Okay, so, I totally admit that I have told the "So, this guy goes to India and buys a magic carpet..." story more in the past month than I have in the past six years, but still - she said "I do", she should at least have to pretend to enjoy them, right? Tolerate them? Refrain from openly mocking them? No?

Fine. Pictures it is.

Monday night at 7:30 (when we had finished dinner and cleaned up the kitchen so I could work on the sink):



Notice how it was still light outside? Yeah, not so much, when I finally finished at 11:30...

So why was I working on the faucet in the kitchen on a Monday night after work? Well, I might have mentioned at some point (I might not, I really don't know) that everything - EVERYTHING - in this house is broken. In fact, the very first thing we fixed after moving in was that bloody tap up there. The day we moved in we noticed that it worked okay as long as you didn't, you know, touch it or anything. The least amount of pressure on the faucet and water would shoot out the back of the tap, all over the counter. It took two trips - one to Crappy Tire and one to Home Despot - to get new o-rings and a new cartridge, but we did get it fixed. Of course, it was remarkable not for the fact that it was broken when we moved in, (because, as I've mentioned, EVERYTHING is broken) but because it seemed to be the one thing in the house without any mayonnaise on it. Even so, we hated that tap - it doesn't have enough clearance underneath it to wash any large pots or pans, and the directional nozzle doohickey doesn't have enough play to spray more than half a side of either sink.

In short, we hated it so much that we felt it more than worthwhile to spend our Home Despot gift cards from the wedding on a new faucet:



Which, of course, took two tries and some creative counter modifications to install properly. On a weeknight. Hence, the maxims.

Speaking of the maxims, if you don't believe me about the first one, here's another example...

One of the outlets in the bear pit is on the wall right above the stairs. Given that Mike spent a lot of time and energy putting some flooring pieces on the riser all along that side, and we wanted to top it with some baseboard to make it all tie in to the other trim, I decided to move the outlet up about 12 inches so it wouldn't be right in the middle of the baseboard. All in all, a relatively simple task, and one I figured shouldn't take more than an hour or so. When I got started, the outlet looked like this (as with all the pictures on this blog, click to embiggen):



After the War Department marked out where the bottom of the outlet should be, I carefully cut a SMALL hole in the approximate location (knowing that if I tried to cut it full-size, I'd either make it too big or in the wrong spot). Well, the location where we marked the outlet to go just happened to be exactly the point where the guy who installed the outlet in the first place had drilled through the stud and passed the electrical wire through from one side to the other. Which meant that the new location for the outlet was in EXACTLY the wrong spot.

After the requisite swearing, I figured out that I'd have to move the outlet down about an inch-and-a-half. Which, of course, would require that we patch the drywall afterward. At which point the War Department told me that this outlet was now officially my own damn problem and walked away to do something else. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have told her that she was going to have to patch the old hole for the outlet anyway, so why not part of the new hole, too?)

After I finished enlarging the hole enough to put the box into the wall, and moved it to its new location, it looked like this:



Fortunately, the War Department came back to do the actual connections - she's not crazy enough to let me do the electrical myself. She also realized that letting me do the mudding was probably a bad idea and stepped in to do it herself. She smoothed and sanded it nicely, and even painted it over. Which is when Maxim the First bit HER, too. You see, we had had to buy a new can of the "cappuccino" we used in the living room between the time we first painted that wall and the time we got around to moving the outlet, and the colour match wasn't quite exact. So we'll have to paint the whole damn wall over with the new stuff.

Oh, one more thing while I'm (sort of) on the subject of the kitchen. Remember this monstrosity?



That thing came in tied for last place in the Ugliest Light Fixture Poll, but -- aside from the Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT!? entry which we tossed into a dumpster down at Ellice more than three months ago and the Faux-Bling chandeliers which didn't survive the first week -- we've decided to replace it first. We replaced its bastard stepchild above the sink ages ago with a nice pendant light, and actually bought this light at the same time, but never got around to putting it up until a few weeks back:



Now if only we can do something about those hideous counters...

And finally, for this post at least, we turn our attention to the outside. I think our long-suffering neighbour had dropped more than a few hints -- chief among them being the time he gave us a dandelion fork with the lame excuse that he already had a few -- about the sorry state of the hedgerow in the front yard. And I have to say that, even without comparing it to the immaculate lawns and frontages of the other houses in our neighbourhood, he had a point:





So on the first really nice Saturday we've had in months, we spent the day weeding, hacking, and cutting all the weeds and nonsense out of the bed, and covered it up with a nice layer of bark mulch:





Looks pretty good, eh? As long as nobody comes into the yard and looks at the other side of the hedge, we're golden.