A couple weeks ago, the door on my half-size, bottom-of-the-line oven fell off. But after a phone call to our landlord who promised to replace it while my mom was here, plans were resurrected to bake our booties off. That was 12 days ago. When the first time frame he gave came and went, we called to check up on things. He gave us a second window of time, promising to definitely be here on Saturday, the day my mom went home. No homemade power bars this time. Jake called on Sunday and got an answering machine. We finally heard back last night and were told he could bring it to us right then but it's not clean 'cause he got it off of craigslist. Really? Or he could clean it up and bring it the next day. Well buddy, chances of you (a) cleaning it appropriately and (b) bringing it tomorrow are very slim. Bring it now. He showed up with this piece of hud.

I was in tears, probably due to heightened emotions from my lack of sleep and general hormone wackiness. I was disappointed. Disappointed that we waited so long only to be brought a dirty oven. But, fortunately, my mother taught me how to clean and Jake thinks I can clean anything (just ask him about our first apartment in California when I took a razor blade to the shower). And, after seeing that the self-cleaner was set to take three and a half hours, I knew I could clean it faster and better. So, armed with boiling water, Lysol, Soft Scrub and four Magic Erasers, I set to work. An hour later, I hadn't made much progress. I grabbed a spoon (I'm not weird, I'm creative) and that grime was comin' right off. It was slow though, since a spoon's surface area isn't very large. I asked Jake if we had a paint scraper. Oddly enough, we do and it worked like a charm. I was done in exactly two hours.

It's not perfect but I feel better serving things from it. And there are several good things about it: it's full-size, which means all my bakeware will fit in it as opposed to only the one cookie sheet that fit in the dinky oven; the dials are in the back, out of reach of little hands; it's glass top for easy wiping; the temperature is set digitally - no more guessing! Lasagna anyone?