always a surprise.

My older older brother (as opposed to my younger older brother) came over yesterday morning. We had a cuppa and a nice chat. Ripley T. Dog did her amazing fetch trick for him, not really a surprise since I believe it's pathological and she can't not do it.

No, the surprise, the first surprise was seeing a hummingbird at the feeder. Here we are, nigh into December, and yessiree bob, there's a pretty supping at the sipper. I had brought all the others down, and refreshed the nectar, but I really didn't think I'd see any till maybe March. So, a nice surprise for the morning. Revisited in the evening, so Flip and Wood were able to marvel as well. What a treat for us!

My older older brother lives here in town, and is, in fact, the reason we live here in this town. He invited us. We're not sure if he regrets it by now. Especially since the gas stove incident...

We lived in Arizona before coming here, and we had a house. We rented the house out for awhile when we first moved here, since it was a mutually beneficial situation. Then the renter bought his own house, and we convinced my sister to buy our house (now it's like an heirloom house, we'll just pass it around the family). My sister dolled the house up real pretty, new floors and paint, and she wanted a new stove in the kitchen. I said "Great! I'll take this one since mine in Vegas is electric and EVERYTHING else in the house is gas." I figured my brother, the former propane guru, could lend us a hand hooking it up, since there was no gas stub poking out of the wall behind the (ew) electric stove. So. This is like, hmm, let me think, a year ago? So this gas stove has been sitting in my garage (in my parking spot in my garage) for about a year, so I finally make the plan and tell the key players (Wood and my brother) that the great gas install is going to happen now. Well, by golly, did they come through for me. I am blessed with handy men because they cut a hole in the wall behind the stove and they ran pipe through the ceiling and made connections and I don't know what all but it ended up that I could now bring in the gas stove. Well..while they were doing that...

Seeing as how it had been sitting in the garage for about a year, I figured the gas stove needed a bit of a dust off and started, well, dusting it off and in my dusting off found rodent turds in my gas stove. We'd had a bit of mouse trouble previously, but bait and traps seemed to take care of it. So I thought, well, I'll just clean this really well and use lots of bleach and rinse and scrub and vacuum and it'll be just fine. So some vigorous scrubbing later, I manage the magic machine into the kitchen and the boys hook it up and now they are off doing other guy things (the nice thing about Wood working with my brother is the swearing is SO much less). So I turn the stove to "self clean", which involves locking the door and the temperature getting really hot for a period of time and supposedly, any spills in the oven are turned to ash and easily swept out with a damp sponge. That's what the pictures look like, anyway. Well, the oven got to maybe 200 degrees when the stench started. Kind of an ammonia-y stench, like, pee stenchy kinda smell. Twenty minutes of this an I'm starting to have an anaphylactic reaction and throw open the doors, windows, turn on the fans, cover my nose and evacuate the children. After thirty minutes I turn it off and admit defeat. Out goes the gas stove, to the curb, leaving a trail (after cleaning! acck!) of rodent turds all the way. Apparently little mousie didn't just explore the stovetop, he explored the oven, the broiler, the insulation, the whole damn thing. I came this close to running out for a brand new gas stove, but I resisted. The electric came back in, plugged back in, works just fine, for an electric stove. Sigh...

The garbage guy doesn't pick up rodent fece laden stoves on his regular run, so we took the thing to the recycling place, thinking at least we're not throwing this big chunk of metal in the landfill, and for our troubles we get, hmm, a dollar twenty?

And the presence of the electric stove in my kitchen was not overlooked by my older older brother.