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Oventabulous!
Houston (and everywhere else too), I have an oven!!!!
It is so great. It is the best thing EVER.
You know the best way to make someone bake tasty treats? Take their oven away for half a year. It worked like a charm on me. I never knew I used an oven so much until I didn’t have one.
It was so exciting to have one again that I was baking in that thing less than three hours after it was installed. I’d probably have baked sooner but I wasn’t in town yet. I was still out at the beach for our weekly visit with Toby. But you can bet I hightailed it out of Orange County as fast as I could so I could get home and put this hunk of 1970’s junk to work. I was soooo very happy.
My Dad is here this weekend and in less than two days he has installed my oven, painted my bathroom floor mint green (that actually clashes terribly with the avocado green tub but is a zillion times better than the water-damaged press-board that used to be there), fixed the one spot in my yard that Holly was escaping from AND taken the cover off my swamp cooler so I can be cool as a cucumber once summer gets here.
Tomorrow if he has time after jury duty (he’s a busy guy) he might even install a motion sensor light in my backyard so I can do laundry in the dark without having to plug an extension cord in. Is my Dad awesome or what? He blows me away with his selflessness and this is just how he is. He’s always like that. He’ll give you the shirt off his back and then ask if you’d like his shoes too.
Anyway, back to my best-thing-ever oven. I do not care one bit that it’s an old hand-me-down from my mom’s trailer on the other side of town. It is a thing of beauty in my eyes. And it works!!! That’s all I care about! So I shined it up…
(I’m just a wee bit excited with the Fonzie thumbs.)
…and put it to use making lemon bars of course! (I seem to have forgotten the “s” in my recipe. Oh well.)
The cherry on top of this whole first-day-of-baking after not being able to bake for five months was that I finally got to use the hand-me-down Kitchen Aid that Bethany gave me back around New Years. I know! Do I score when it comes to hand-me-downs or what?!! It even came with stickers! Bethany got a new one for Christmas and mailed me her old one. You know that postage was a whopper.
Sadly, when I got it I had to leave it in the box and hide it in the back corner of Bug’s room. It didn’t fit on my counter and I knew that I couldn’t really use it for anything until I got the oven fixed, which seemed it like wouldn’t happen until the tenth of Never the way we were going around and around trying to find a thermal couple that didn’t exist.
Well the tenth of never did come! And baking with a Kitchen Aid is about a thousand times better than I even expected. The ease! No wonder all you crazy foodie people love baking so much! It’s easy when you have a handy dandy mixer machine that does all the hard work for you. I had no idea!
So I mixed and I whirred and twirled that Kitchen Aid like I was a musician and it was my guitar. And then I texted Bethany excitedly, of course, and took about a thousand pictures. If you ever want to know why there is flour in the buttons on my camera, now you’ll know why. But don’t worry, I blew a bunch of compressed air on it afterwards and I think it’s still as good as new—I hope. What can I say? I use my equipment.
Then I popped those lemon bars in the oven and went outside to enjoy the sunset with the neighborhood kids.
There were these really cool lenticular clouds out that looked amazing at twilight. I tried to capture it on the camera but unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to take a photo of them without all the distracting houses and trees in the way. Distracting cat-fairies riding by on tricycles are great though.
And then the lemon bars were done! They were so tasty. Except I got a little over-zealous with my backyard lemons and added an extra tablespoon of zest that wasn’t in the recipe. Ooops. All the kids in the neighborhood have been reporting with puckered lips that the lemon bars are way way way too sour, which leaves way too many lemon bars for all the adults who are so annoyingly watching their calorie intake. Watching calories can be so tiresome. Thankfully, I have had company over in the last few days and I’m happy to report that I only have about four lemon bars left in my fridge taunting me. Tomorrow I’ll have to take a glamour shot of one so I can share the taunting with you. It’s only fair.
I’m happy to report that I have baked lemon bars, roasted cauliflower and cooked a Sunday roast (actually my mom cooked it but I still got to take credit for it). And! As if that wasn’t enough good news I now have towel bars, something my kitchen was sorely lacking.
Life is good. It’s oventabulous.
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Meet Beatrice and Bugly
I have chairs now. They’re not exactly what I was going for but they’re growing on me. We’ve named them Beatrice and Bugly. Beatrice is the gold one on the right. I wanted to name them Ugly and Fugly but Bug thinks the golden chair is rather pretty and princess-like and deserves a better name than Fugly. So we compromised and came up with Beatrice and Bugly. Hopefully Bugly doesn’t turn out to be an omen for creepy crawly bed bugs that you all have so graciously warned me about in the comments. Eeeeee…. I’m totally creeeped out.
I’m pretty sure they are clean though. They smell like a combination of dry cleaner and moth balls and I’ve inspected them deeply and see no sign of bugs or dirt. But I guess time will tell. My Uncle who happens to be a pest control operator is visiting so I’ll ask him to check them out too.
I really like the lines of the top part of the chairs. I love the velvet and the colors. I feel like I’m on a tv show from the late sixties. But I hate the bottom part of the chairs. They’re rocking chairs! Which I do not like at all. They swivel around in circles and are always pointing the wrong way when I walk into the room. I think they secretly are plotting against me when I’m not around.
I thought maybe I could detach the bottom ruffle and the circular rocking parts and then attach some spindly wooden legs that would look much cooler. However, upon closer inspection I found that the rocker is totally incorporated into the chair structure and taking it apart would seriously compromise their stability. So rocking I am stuck with. Though I do have to admit that my guests who have sat in them so far approve. They are quite fun to swivel around in so you can converse with anyone in any part of the room.
And the best part? The dogs do not like them. So far there have been no dogs sitting on chairs. I think that’s great.
I’m not 100% on them though and since they only cost $12 and $17 respectively, I might take them back to the thrift store if something better comes along. We’re also talking about making an outdoor living room where my carport is so they might work out there for a summertime thing. I don’t know. I figure I’m just renting them for a flat rate of $29 and I can return them whenever I like.
But for now they’re kinda fun. I even bought a mumu for fifty cents at a garage sale to get in the spirit. It so groovy and unflattering. I’m sure it would look super cute on me if I was seventeen though. Maybe I should make it back into a tablecloth. Or I could just keep it around for those crazy days when you don’t care what you look like because it’s ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE DEGREES IN THE SHADE! I’m so not looking forward to those days.
For now I can just wear it when nobody is looking and pretend I’m living in the good old days back before I was born.
Were you wondering where I put my old white chair? It was quite a conundrum at first. I went from having no chairs to suddenly having too many chairs. I tried to fit them all in my living room and while it was great for conversation, it really got on my nerves that everything was so crowded. I didn’t realize what a neurotic freak I was until I found myself up at night stressing out about having too many chairs in my living room.
The next day I moved everything around in a manic blur and ended up with the white chair in my Parisian bedroom. I can’t believe it fit. It is actually kind of nice there. Holly thinks I put it there just for her.
Addendum:
Now that I’m looking at Bugly in photos, I’m not loving him so much. What do you say? Hot or NOT. I’m thinking most of you are thinking I’ve lost my mind in some kind of seventies haze. He really does look better in real life and that crocheted blanket actually is so clashy it’s cool, in my mind.
