Poor Louie with his long coat is suffering from the intense heat we’re currently experiencing here in the Okanagan.  I continue to run around in the yard in my underwear and even at that I’m over-dressed so I can just imagine the poor pets.

Petra, Kathy and I had a nice lunch last week sitting out on the veranda at Harvest Golf course’s restaurant.  It’s a gorgeous setting, and the weather was ideal.  And surprise, they actually have quite a lot of decent things on the menu.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been to places where I really had to force myself to order from their dreck menu.

I don’t know what got into me but on Sunday at the dot of 10:00 AM when Sears Home opened, I raced in and bought a stove.  Boom!  It wasn’t really all that sudden, as I’d been browsing on-line for a used stove, and then I thought oh what the Hell.  I then went on-line and perused Sears and picked the one I wanted, then went in and ordered it.

I noticed the majority of the new stoves have these ghastly huge windows that fill almost the entire oven door.  I said to the salesperson I wonder what people do when they get something stuck between the panes, as invariably happens if you bake a lot.  He chuckled ruefully and said yeah, really.

The stove I bought has a very small window, is a Frigidaire and is white, so now I’m in a mess as my old fridge is almond.  Remember almond?  It came after harvest gold and avocado and before stainless steel, which I don’t like.  But as the fridge is still fine I couldn’t see throwing it out right away, so will try to cope with the mismatched appliances.  Cue theme from Deliverance or The Beverly Hillbillies.

One day in early 1999 I was out on a Sunday and on impulse bought a new stove, fridge and dishwasher at Sears.  I remember coming home and saying to Denis guess what I bought at the mall today and him going what? It was amazing, really.  Now that’s what I call shopping.

So these three old friends are now 14 years old, but the stove saw too much action.  It’s the stove where the kids made their vile pancakes from home ec and also the mad food fetishes like deep fried onion rings, crepes, and deep fried calamari.

I started the fruitcake business on that stove.  I actually ran the business from that one stove for quite a while, though I had to use the United Church’s so-called inspected kitchen as a front.  You know, rent the kitchen one day a month, then turn out 500 fruitcakes and act like I did it all there.  The usual.

So it’s a bit sad to say good-bye to the stove, though I won’t miss its cracked ceramic top and filthy horrible oven and cloudy window.  I kind of feel like buying hundreds of pounds of fruit and making even more jam, just to try to push the elements right over their limits.

But as it’s 37 degrees out I won’t do any of that.  Instead Louie, the cats and I will remain inside the air conditioned house and peruse recipes so that we can inaugurate the new stove when it arrives next Wednesday.