On our first walk through of our house, I got excited about our kitchen. All the appliances were stainless steel Frigidaire units with the exception of the stainless Dacor convection oven.

Shortly after we moved in we realized there was something wrong with the convection oven. The circuit breaker for it had been switched off long ago and when we turned it back on we got an error message. Back off it went.

It didn’t take long before we realized that the range had seen better days too. One of the burners is free of its mounts and lives half submerged beneath the surface of the range and the oven seemed to take forever to get up to temperature.

The other night we tried to make french fries but the oven never got hotter than a faulty tanning booth. A closer inspection revealed that it was the sad little igniter element that was doing all the heating. It seems these new-fangled ovens have a safety valve that doesn’t allow gas to flow through the burner until igniter has heated up fully. That way you reduce the possibility of filling the house with gas when the igniter fails. That’s great but it ain’t helping me. It means I can’t light my oven manually.

So, a guy is coming tonight to fix the oven and I turned the convection oven back on to see if I could find the error code (of course its not showing an error now). This little dream kitchen isn’t so much of a dream anymore. If they were cheap appliances I could think about replacing them but they aren’t cheap. I figure to replace the range and oven would run about $2100 so we pretty much have to fix them.

As long as I get to cook french fries again, everything will be okay.

Many of you know that not so deeply hidden inside of me is a Clark W Griswold. This weekend he surfaced when I attempted to light the house with Christmas lights.

The initial plan was simple, not animatronics or statues, but extensive, many surface illuminated. I had planned on lighting the gutters, all the hedges, the door around the garage, around the front door, and around the windows. I initially bought 9 boxes of lights which, in retrospect, was laughably inadequate for a job of this size. Before I could get to that problem though, I had to solve a physics problem. How was I supposed to reach the gutters on the front of the house when the hedges wouldn’t allow for step ladder I have?

First I tried jamming the ladder in between the hedge and house so the ladder was tipped at approximately . 065 degrees or, for you lay people, straight up and down. I climbed three steps and soiled myself as I realized that not only was this comically unsafe, but I still couldn’t reach the gutter and I couldn’t get down. Half a dozen broken hedge branches later I was back on the ground and trying to figure this out.

Two weeks earlier at Target I shunned a $12 pole that allows smart people to mount lights on their gutters without a ladder. Suckers. Now I was on my way back to Target to buy it. Of course, once I got there, I realized that the smart people had bought all of them already. Scratch the gutter lights.

So now I began stringing lights on one of the bushes near the garage where I was plugging into the outlet. 6 strings of light into it, I realized the math wouldn’t work. I had used half my lights on one bush. Now I stripped the bush of lights and concentrated on the front hedges where my work went smoothly.

Finally I was almost finished when my lights ran out. With one more hedge left I had to hit Kmart for more lights. 30 minutes later I was back on the hedge with things looking great. That was, of course, until I plugged into the last strand and it all went dark. Apparently, 19 is one too many strands of mini lights. So, I unplugged the last light string and all was well.

Next year I’ll place my lighting order in July so that I can get a light delivery straight from the factory. We’ll back the truck up and load of the garage with enough lights to make my Christmas illumination dream come true!

We picked out our Christmas tree last night. If we didn’t do it last night we would have been doomed to wait until at least Monday when Jaime and I could go together. This isn’t exactly a boon Christmas with the baby coming and Jaime taking time off work so we were looking for trees on the cheap.

Last year, living in Waltham, we got taken for about $45 on a tree. Granted, it was a beautiful tree but as all Christmas trees do, it died in four weeks. That’s about $11.25 a week to rent a tree that’s going to leave a mess on your floor if you’re keeping score, kids.

Jean recommended “Jim’s Christmas Trees” to us. Its right off Rt. 20 and not too far away so we set out for it. Sure enough, Jim sells all of his trees, regardless of size or condition for $23. Its a good deal if you get there early when the pickings are good. I’m guessing people stopping by in two weeks won’t feel the same way. Jim’s is also located across the street from the Griswolds.

This house was ridiculous. Enough lights to play a baseball game by and dozens of wood cutouts of different cartoon and fairy tale characters all very well painted and arranged around the different lights. It screamed of a man who relishes the time away from his family while he works on the Christmas decorations all year.

So now we have a decent tree and a beautiful wreath on the door. We started the process of distributing the Christmas gear around the house and tonight I’ll tackle the tree’s lights. Tomorrow is house lighting day and with any luck we’ll have the ornaments up by Monday night.

Of course, this is all assuming Jaime doesn’t go into labor…

I’m beginning to think that steam heating has an element of black magic to it. In some ways its great. It produces heat quickly by having this big steel contraption just radiate heat into the room. The steam also tends to keep the humidity levels a little bit higher than say, forced air. Some things about it though, I find less than pleasant.

At least once a week I have to check the water level on the system and add water. A hassle for sure but explainable and easy to accomplish. More trying is adjusting the vents on the radiators. Each radiator has an air vent that you can open or close to varying degrees in order to adjust how quickly that radiator heats up. You might think you should just open them all the way but you’d be wrong. According to the heating guys, each radiator should be vented according to its size. I could do that but then the upstairs radiators would shut off once the first floor radiators heated the room where the thermostat is leaving the bedrooms to serve as meat lockers. So, I have to fiddle to get the upstairs radiators to heat faster in a battle to keep the two floors similarly heated.

The most fun though is the baby’s room. The radiator in there is hell bent on giving me an aneurysm. When I open its vent all the way it spits dirty water out. So I consult the web and find the radiator is out of pitch. I adjusted it to allow for the water (the result of spent steam) to run out of the radiator into the supply/drain pipe. Still spitting water. So I consult the web again and find the vent may be dirty. I spent $7 on a new vent, installed it, and fired her up. Still spitting water. Screw the web.

Now I’m thinking that the only explanation is that the radiator’s position is a little screwy (it top, by the pipe, is pitched to the wall while the opposite end is not) causing water to collect in a corner of the radiator. My guess is that its a small amount of water because it only starts spitting once the radiator is heated 3/4 of the way across. Once it gets to that point though the pressure of the steam forces water through the vent. So, tonight I’ll try again to fix the bugger. Of course, this time I’ll have the very unpleasant task of disconnecting this behemoth and draining it of any trapped water before I put it back into a proper position.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll need a young priest and an old priest…