E.T. Broke Stove

You know that scene from the movie E.T. where the scary government dudes who are all dressed up in haz-mat suits put a bunch of fabric and tubes on E.T.'s house? Some guy came and put a little bit of stuff like that up on our house.


It was for a Home Energy Evaluation. The government says that if we get this evaluation done, we can get a small reimbursement on all the new windows that we have ordered. I hate government hassles, but the chance to save some money makes it seem worth a try.

I'll let you know if the inevitable red tape starts to drive me crazy.

There's an update on Mark's musical status. It turns out he's in the band! They've actually been waiting for a good guitar player to come along. The guy that currently plays guitar writes the songs and sings, but is not so stuck on the idea of playing complicated stuff on the guitar - he'd rather concentrate on writing and singing, and it seems that he'll play the basic guitar parts now and Mark will do the elaborate stuff.

A few nights ago Mark was waiting for the band guys to come pick him up to carpool to practice, and we were both hanging out in the living room when a loud, irritating noise suddenly issued forth from the kitchen. We both looked at each other, aghast. We knew what it was.

When we moved into this house a few months ago, we innocently turned on the timer on the oven while cooking something. The "timing" part of it worked, and it buzzed when the time was up, but then we found that we could not get the buzzer to turn off. We twisted the dial every which way, broke two pieces off it, and eventually had to go get pliers and force the dial until the annoying buzz stopped.

EEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! --That's what it sounded like. It was really annoying. We've left it alone since then.

So imagine our surprise the other day when the buzzer apparently finished counting down about three months' worth of time and started buzzing.

We went to the kitchen and tried to make it stop.

Then something in the dial broke, and it started turning freely in our hands. The buzzing continued. Mark looked out the window in the hopes that his ride had arrived - no luck.

We ended up hauling the oven out from the wall and unplugging it. In the sweet silence that followed, we took apart the back of the oven and yanked some wires out, permanently disabling the buzzer.

During this process, we discovered a big fluorescent light built into the top part of the oven, hidden along with the fuses under a metal cover. Who puts a metal cover over a light? It's irrelevant; we can't use it because as you can see in the below picture, the empty socket probably used to be the switch to turn it on:


Empty!!

They were ripped out long before we came to possess this stove. Now we have ripped out most of the timer dial and some wiring. The appliance is slowly becoming a shell, and when it dies for good I am getting one of those fancy ovens with the flat glass tops! Alright!