It's a usual week day, you are making pretty good progress with your to-do's. The Washing machine is mid-cycle, the dishwasher is humming and you have just placed a tray of cupcakes into the pre-heated oven. A vanilla candle is hard at work making your toilet and laundry smell wonderful and your kids are playing nicely in the toy room which is relitavely tidy. Yep, its a good day. You walk down the hallway with your toddlers dirty nappy in a bag and all you hear is a strange, new, frightening sound... your washing machine beeping like someone is on a heart monitor and is not doing to well... I check out the situation and the washing machine has stopped and gone off completely mid-cycle. I press buttons, I switch the power socket on and off. Nothing. Oh no... please no... not the washing machine! However, crisis averted, my mother in law, who lives on the same property (different house) comes in and asks if my power went out too. Oh glory thank God, that is good. Yes the power must have just gone out. So we go to the mains and switch the power back on and hooray the washing machine picks up where it left off. PHEW. about 15 mins later my timer goes off. Oh thats right, cupcakes! I go to pull them out and they are still runny... HUH?! Oh yes, the power went out, I forgot to switch back on the oven switch which has its own. Okay, no worries, go switch it back on.
Go back to the oven to check if its now working.. the red light is on to say its heating up again, goodie! The cupcakes are probably ruined and will be flat and dense...however my sweet tooth husband will still eat them so I proceed with the baking. I return 10 mins later to check them... the oven is still cool. I place my hand near where the element is...nothing... oh no. I turn on the hotplate hobs, yep they are warming up fine. I turn on the grill, it seems to be okay as well. Its just the oven. Wait... just the oven? Sigh.
So I waited until hubby got home to deal with the situation. I pulled out the instruction booklet and warranty details though and had a looksy. Of course the extended warranty we paid for was out by a few months. That makes perfect sense. Hubby gets home and pulls the oven out, to check out whats going on out back. We look over the instructions and he begins to investigate when he suddenly jerks back slightly and makes a bit of a "urgh!" noise. "What is it?" I ask... almost not even wanting to know....
DEAD MOUSE. Seriously, the thing killed our oven. How? It's tiny little self was climbing up the back of the oven wiring, and just happened to grab onto the two wrong wires at the same time. Perhaps he was even having a nibble, who knows, but what we do know is that he shorted out the entire house, electrocuted himself to death and was stiffly hanging there, paws spread out grabbing onto two wires for dear life with its tongue hanging out... sounds pretty funny now that I type it out, but at the time... it was just a violation of all things sacred. Ugh. Little critter destroyed my oven. That is one expensive freak accident!!
Okay so we call the insurance company to find out just exactly what the deal is, since there is some kind of clause for animal damage. Apparently mishaps involving vermon like mice are not covered because it is within your power to control such creatures (extermination etc) wow... says the guy who has obviously never a day in his life visited the country. Sigh. I politely as I could, asked "So... out of curiousity... what exactly is covered under this animal clause?" He goes on to explain it also doesn't cover your own pets either. It is for if say, a horse decides to wander onto your property and oh, i dont know, sit on your couch and break it. Or if someones dog comes running into the house and tears up your carpet or eats your iphone or something. You know, things that will never ever EVER in a million years happen, those things are covered. But a field mouse coming in from the acreage surrounding you, destroying the wiring behind your oven where they had been secretly nesting... well that's not covered.
So... I put the phone down quietly, and prepare to explain to my husband the situation. He stands there like a deer in headlights, stunned by the ridiculousness of what I am saying. Shakes his head, sighs deeply and we both sit down at the kitchen table to mourn a great loss. You see, the oven? I never did like her much. She was the only one we could afford at the time, was conventional not fan forced, didn't have a timer or a light, had weird temperature inside (like hot spots so ONE cupcake would burn severely while the rest were just done), she and I had a love/hate relationship. She may have been a basic, messed up old girl, but she was MY basic, messed up old girl and I had learned how to use her despite her faults and not so convenient features. She fed our family and for that I was greatful. We currently do NOT have the spare cash to throw into a new oven... this was the dillema. What to do. Okay so I have a slow cooker, microwave and the hobs and grill still work, so technically I could cruise along just fine for quite some time without an oven. However it is winter, and I do have to feed 4 of us... and the oven does get used alot. I bake. I do roasts, I need my oven, eventually, at some stage.
We went to bed. Early. And slept heavily.
Morning came.... We glanced at each other with this look that very rarely comes upon our faces. It's the
"I do not have the energy to deal with this right now, lets pretend its not happening for a while please" kind of look. You see both of us have our own things going on at the moment. I am 29 weeks pregnant and really feeling it, amongst other things, and hubby is extremely busy with building his sisters home for her (kit home) plus work and just a whole bunch of other things going on... we are too busy and tired to deal. And just like that, a silent unspoken agreement was made. I will adjust the menu for the coming week to things I can do without the oven, and he wont complain about the lack of baked goods or quality of some meals that usually are done in the oven but have to be done another way. We went a whole week without even glancing at the oven problem. It was ignorant bliss.
7 days later, meal plan time came around again and we knew this had to be dealt with. We were looking at teeny tiny ovens that you can just place on top of the countertop. We were thinking we could just make do with that until further notice. I could jam a small roast in it... heat up frozen goods on our lazy nights (Sundays) things like that. It would be doable. Hubby went to town to pick up some things for the house he is building for his sister and came home with a beautiful new oven... what?! how?! My sister in law paid the difference between one of those shoddy little ones we were going to buy, and a normal sized oven of the standard variety. Significant contribution let me tell you! I cried. I just cried like a thankful puppy dog. What a blessing it was! What relief and joy!
Enter Phase two of "Can it seriously get any worse?"
So the elation was still there of receiving a new oven and hob set in stainless steel (our last one was white and ugly, this one matched the fridge and looked all modern), with fan force, interior light and timer, all the basic features that weren't on old Bessie. Then it came to installation time. I won't go into the gory details, but basically keywords are.... husband, large sharp power tools, bench cutting, measuring, drilling, building, fridge moving, powerpoint inspecting, hard-wiring and power point confusion, phone calls, mess, loud loud noises all day long, 2 nights of eating takeaway for dinner, sawdust... sawdust everywhere, exhaustion, more mess, kitchen a shambles, stress level rising, scratched countertops, give up.... then finally a solution.
I am happy to say that the oven is being installed tomorrow by our electritian for a very very good cheap price, another major blessing. I will be able to cook meals and use my kitchen again. The saw dust is slowly being dealt with and I can see the floor and my appliances again. But wow was that a major ordeal. A messy one where you keep hitting dead ends and wondering "why me?!"
On the very bright side, I have a beautiful new oven, all will be back in order in a day or two and it didn't cost us all that much to sort it out.
Looking back at what felt like a chaotic situation, I am able to assess it properly.
I see what could have been done to keep this from being less of a problem.
Obviously it is not within our power to magically know when a mouse is going to play cliffhanger on the back of our oven. However some things I had in order made things easier...and some things I did not have in order made things way harder.
For example. I knew exactly where my instruction manual, receipt and warranty details were. I have a well organised large file where I keep all those things, divided into sections like "electronics", "Kitchen", "baby items" etc. So, I did not have to stress out and search every drawer and shelf in the house for those things, I immediately and calmly was able to walk over and flip through to find it safely tucked away right where I had left it a few years before. Not so long ago, I would have been frantically searching, feelings of "why didnt I put that away somewhere Id remember?!" washing over me, thinking how annoyed hubby would be when I couldnt find the manual or the receipt, knowing it would put pressure on the situation and so on and so forth. I was so relieved to be able to go to the system I had created and just get what I needed when I needed it. Organisational win.
(I use this system, tweaked. If your interested, there is a youtube vid by Alejandra.tv on youtube, HERE )
Something that I was not prepared for, and normally would be but had gotten slack? Freezer meals. I menu plan, and for a long time now have always kept batches of food in the freezer. About a weeks worth. I cook extra and freeze in containers, so for busy nightts, or weeks where I am sick or for emergency times like this, I have fully cooked family meals ready to defrost and heat up. Usually in the oven hahaha, but can be done in microwave too. I had NOTHING. Zero... zilch...nada. Not a single frozen meal in my freezer. The one time we really really could have used it. It would have taken a great deal off my mind to default to that preparedness. But sadly, I dropped the ball there, and there wasn't really any good reason for it. I just didn't do it. I could have easily. It really doesn't take much to just cook a double portion of something, you are cooking it anyway!
Now I haven't beaten myself up over it or any other thing that I've noticed, no use crying over spilt milk and all. It won't do me any good feeling bad about it and hey, we are all human, you cannot be perfectly organised in all areas at all times! So its okay, I gave myself a break. However it has been really good to see just how worth it being organised and prepared actually is. You don't realise what your achieving until the need arises. The truth is that in my habit of freezer meal prepping, I had lost sight of why I do it. I slacked off because I guess I didnt feel I "needed" to do it so why bother? At least subconsiously I think thats what happened. Turns out, it is a very very good idea to just do it. It is a lifesaver in certain situations. Lesson learned.
So I am able to sit here, and feel like I have good motivation to keep my life an organised and prepared kind of life. I do not have any wildly misled fantasies about ever being perfect at an organised life. Nor do I strive for perfection. But it is really good, after a bit of household turmoil, to be able to look at a situation and reflect on what works, and what could be improved so that stress levels can be kept down and efficiency levels can be nice and high.
Just thought I'd share these thoughts with you as I think a bit of reflection is good sometimes, and reading about someone elses can cause us to do our own little assessment and adjustments here and there as well. Perhaps you can start working on a receipts, manual and warranty system If you don't have one yet, or think about starting to freeze meals if you've never done so. Or maybe its just a good time to think about any areas you may realise you've dropped the ball on and could easily pick up again. A preparedness sweep if you will.
I have a new section in my planner... it's called: "Preparedness organisation Projects" and its a new list of things i am remembering that I need to stock up on or find a good place for or to organise. Like candles. We get power outages more often than the suburbs experience them. I am forever forgetting candles!! I mean good ones with decent lighting. The scented and pretty ones or tealight ones dont cut it. You need those long boring white ones that give off good light. I am going to prepare a power-out box and keep it in the pantry. Good candles, a few torches (one each for the kids and a lantern...that is actually charged up! A lighter etc). We do have these things around the house, but the last few times the power has gone out, the lantern battery was low, or I couldn't find the candles, or the torches were broken coz the kids had got to them at some stage and I didn't know. It always puts pressure on the situation and can so easily be prevented from being a problem.
What can you do around your home now, to keep things as smooth sailing as possible when an inconvenient problem arises in your home?
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