Almost Moved In and A Very Scary Oven...

Here's a picture of our living room a few days ago. My crafting area is in the corner behind Paul... and mom and dad are giving us a couch, which should make the living room look more like home! I'm waiting on posting pictures until things are a bit more done.

I think that all of the clothes are put away! It took a lot of digging through baby clothes boxes to determine what was in tiny baby sizes and what still fit Sadie, but things are finally coming together. And Sadie has been a huge help!

She's really starting to act older these past few days. She's taken a sudden interest in talking (finally) and spent this morning following me around the kitchen saying "go. go. go. go. Walk!" over and over again. She is also quite the little housekeeper, trying to wash dishes (her toy cups) when she's in the bathtub, grabbing the broom and sweeping the kitchen, and helping me clean the kitchen floor with an extra sponge (I've found that giving her a clean, spare sponge that's her own to play scrub the floor with can be quite a distraction when I'm trying to get something else done.

Our dishwasher has been replaced with one that works and now we're just waiting on a replacement stove. Yesterday I almost posted a long rant on the stove situation, but resisted. Basically here's what's happened so far:

The first time I turned to stove on I thought I noticed an electrical smell... But since it was kind of overwhelmed by the burning smell of everything that was caked to it, I couldn't quite be sure. As I posted earlier, the stove didn't work very well, with the heating elements only glowing or working in parts and then turning on and off by themselves.

I had mostly been using the stovetop by itself and noticed some more minor problems. #1 was that the entire top of the stove would become very, very hot when the burners were on... I found this out in a most unpleasant way (thank goodness we put up a fence to keep Sadie out of the kitchen).

Yesterday I was finally desperate enough to cook something that I fired up the stove itself again. The result was very bad... with half of the food being charred and the other half turning out raw (I can now say I would not advise ever trying to cook on a stove that isn't really working...). But the real problem came when I tried to turn it off and realized two things: 1) the entire stove was burning hot to touch (I was more careful this time and didn't get burned... even though I'd thought it was only a stove top problem that was causing the whole thing to heat up) and 2) the stove seemed to be getting hotter and hotter despite the fact that it had been "off" for around forty five minutes. And the faint "electric" smell was stronger than ever...

I turned it on and off several times and waited. It was clearly still on. Paul managed to grab the back of the oven near the knobs and pull it away from the wall, but we found there was no plug to pull... it was wired directly in... The apartment manager wasn't home... and Paul was about to leave for work... I was starting to feel a little panicked. Finally my mom, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, asked if we'd looked at the breaker box to see if the range was labeled. And it was. So we finally killed the oven with the switch there... and it's still shut off...

We explained the entire situation in writing today... I'm really hoping they fix this more quickly than they fixed the dishwasher. A stove is a little more important in day to day life! And I'm definitely not turning that thing back on! It's scary!

Tomorrow's another busy day. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning!