Sunday, May 23, 2004

Egg Fry and a Gentle Breeze

In the middle of frying up egg sandwiches last evening, the stove presented me with a loose knob and only two settings--(red) high and off--for the one decent sized heating coil.  The other coil is too small to cook anything much worth eating (it's like a Weight Watchers burner); the other side of the stovetop is a griddle thing--fashionable in the late seventies, I guess.  It would have worked for the egg fry, but it takes a while to heat up, and the stove didn't go on the fritz until after I'd made D. and Ph.'s sandwiches.  No, really, you go ahead and eat; I'll fume over this crappy appliance and the life-threatening popping sounds it's making (while my egg hardens to the faint heat of a might-be-on-might-be-off burner.  

So I pulled it apart today, figuring a knob can't be too hard to replace, even on an old stove.  Trouble is none of the hardware mega-stores around here carry appliance parts and the Maytag fix-it shop doesn't open until 8:30 Monday morning.  I had the camera out to take a pic of the wires on the switch I was removing, you know, to pixelate my memory because I would forget where each of the five wires should be reconnected.  Then I took a couple more pics--the ones you see here.  

With any amount of luck, this will be my final post in a growing series about spiffing up the house for market.  We've had several inquiries, given out five tours of the house ("Aw...notice the splendid view.") No offers yet.  Twenty-three fliers have been pulled from the box hanging next to the sign stuck in the front yard--in two weeks.

My only planned house-fix for the day was the tug-chain switch in the house fan.  It's old, irregular.  Sometimes you pull on it and the fan works, other times you pull on it, nothing.  So I cut the power, started taking out screws.  And what I found was deeply troubling.  The insulation on the old-a*s fan wires were all cracked, revealing bare wires.  Plus, working on a house fan is physically demanding: my head was crookt into a tight space, the Sahara winds were drifting down from the attic space, the lighting was poor, my step ladder was quivering. The electrical line from the house was fine--that much was a relief.  So I chopped the power supply to the fan, grabbed some 18 gauge extensions, wrapped-spliced-routed, patched in the cycle switch, and affirmed my faith that miracles happen.  It works. From pure misery to pure joy, just like that.  Now, no more pictures or blog entries about home repair.  Promise.

Posted by Derek Mueller at May 23, 2004 9:50 PM to Rhetorico-Geography