Our oven caught fire. Except not fire, fire. More... welding wand fire like a sparkler.
And I made a pretty good chocolate caramel bundt cake and I'm going to share the recipe because it's too good to keep to myself.
Oh, and I studied for my midterm which is today.
Biology is going to be the death of me.
Speaking of biology. I have history of breast cancer in my family. There's a post on it here, but even better a very recent post here that I just did for my English class. They explain the history of this but it's a concern for my doctor that I might have the breast cancer gene (brca gene) based on the fact that my mom had breast cancer at the young age of 38. I guess that's a red flag for it.
We've been trying to convince my insurance to cover the test for the gene since without insurance it's a lovely $3,000. But my insurance denied the request claiming they needed two generations of evidence of the gene where we only had one.
The catch is that my mom is adopted so we really have no way of knowing about that second generation.
Our concern isn't breast cancer so much as it is ovarian cancer. I guess, according to my doctor, that once ovarian cancer is far along enough to detect, it's too late to do much of anything about it.
So I would like to know one way or the other. Because if it turns out that I do have this gene, we can just do some preventative surgery to remove my ovaries and not worry about it. I'm done having kids anyway.
With my new job I have new insurance so we're trying it again.
Normally my doctor, who is amazing, would have just sent the test off for me, but it's a matter of spitting into a tube and I, not anticipating that before I went to my appointment, had gum in my mouth. So he sent everything home with me to do myself.
Saturday morning, a whole week later, I finally brought myself to pull that test kit out. It came with a small bottle of mouthwash. Fill the little cup full of mouthwash, swish for 30 seconds, and spit the whole lot of it into the specimen tube. Twice.
Seal it up in all sorts of different levels of plastic, slap the mailing label on it, and drop it off at your nearest Fed Ex store.
Except Fed Ex, seeing that it was a medical specimen package, wanted to know, in front of everyone else who was milling around the counter, what was in it?
"We can't always handle these. You might have to drop it in the box. What's in it?" He asks, as he's holding it in the air. Obviously worried about "not handling it" as he has it in his hand at eye level, peering at it.
All eyes are on me.
"Spit," I announced loudly. I guess if you can't crawl under a rug you may as well just own it. Yes, thank you for asking, I am indeed mailing spit.
At least I didn't pee all over it I suppose.
And just for the record, they're allowed to handle spit so it's all good.
We had a pretty fun get together on Saturday with a few friends and my sister McKell and her man, Scott, who just so happened to be having a birthday so at their request, I made this cake:
I was going to post the recipe but I think I might wait and do that tomorrow since I just had a lovely introduction that included talk about spit.
Tomorrow I'll post the recipe for this cake, caramel and all.
And pictures of what it looks like with 43 candles on it. Happy birthday Scott. :)
To finish the weekend off our oven caught on fire.
Sort of. It wasn't the up in flames everyone out of the house type of fire. It was more of a welding rod, looks like a sparkler type of fire.
Excuse the mess on the bottom of my oven. Of all the things I take on in my life, cleaning the oven is obviously not one of them.
I might lose good mother/wife points for this, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make right now.
Brynn wanted to make brownies. Mom (that's me) was buried in studying for her midterm and dinner was leftover lasagna. Heat it up when you're ready for it. A far cry from our usual level of Sunday dinner expectations so Brynn decided, if nothing else, they were having hot brownies for dessert.
(Not that anyone was actually complaining about it. My family has been crazy supportive of my having to do homework and studying.)
She mixed it up and poured the batter into a 9x13 and put it into the pre-heated oven. A minute later the girls start calling out in panicked shouts, "Mom! The oven is... lighting up!"
So I check it out. Sure enough.
"Hey babe? There's something going on with the element."
It was cracked and sparking and even though the oven had been turned off, the sparking wouldn't stop. This wasn't something either of us had ever encountered before and we didn't know what to do. West tried to douse it out with a wet paper towel.
That didn't work.
After several more failed attempts to douse out the sparks, West thought if he cut it we could just pull the burning piece out. But cutting it made it burn at the new broken end, even worse than it had been.
I'm not going to lie, we were panicking. He starts telling me to call 9-1-1 because he can't get it to stop and in that instant he yanks the stove away from the wall and unplugs it to throw the whole appliance out into the yard to avoid starting our house on fire.
And with that it went out.
So.
If the element ever breaks and starts sparking on you, just hit the breaker. I kind of feel silly about how frantic we felt about the whole situation but I guess if it's not something you've ever seen before and you can't get it to stop after five minutes of effort and suddenly it gets worse... I suppose we were validated. But now I'm sharing the information.
It's normal. And it still feeds off the electricity even if it's not on.
Luckily we don't have to buy a whole new oven, just a new element. I can handle that.
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