My oven! She is working!

My oven has been a little cranky for a while - taking longer to heat up than I'd like, but cooking the food just fine.

Tuesday night, as I prepared my oh, so gourmet dinner (frozen pot pies - Jonathan has a class on Tuesday nights.), I noticed it wasn't working at all.

As in, the potpies sat in the oven for three hours.

I think they melted. But hot? Nope. Brown? Double nope.

Wednesday was a work day. I improvised a shepherd's pie by cooking the ground beef with onions and red peppers and some frozen spinach on top of the stove, and making the potatoes in the microwave.

I forgot to pierce the potatoes at first, but the first explosion was enough for me to figure out what I'd done wrong, and as they were in a covered casserole dish, no harm was done. I mashed them with hot water, salt and pepper. I used the same casserole dish - put a layer of potato, all the meat and veg mixture and another layer of potato. Was delicious.

This morning, before pa-kua, we called a repairman. Okay, first we argued whether I should call the gas company, but we looked at their website and they'd tell you which stoves to get and where to get them, but they wouldn't repair thm. Then he suggested I call my boss, who manages buildings, and find out who she uses. So I did, but no answer.

Then I decided that enough was enough. I called two places in the yellow pages. One gave me an answering machine, so I hung up. The second had a human answer.

Less than an hour later, the guy was pulling up in front of our house. Which meant it was a good thing we cleaned up the stove top as soon as I called. Turned out that the igniter was broken. He put in a new one.

All this time, I'd thought I'd had a pilot light in the oven. Now I'm going to have to leave my oven on all through holidays. But it *works*. Remember the potpies? They're getting nice and brown right now.

As for pa-kua - we did falls today. I'm not great at them, and I'm really bad at rolls. But I'll get better. I hope.