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First of all, Happy New Year to all Jewish friends and readers!

Also, seems like a good time to show a photo of something I found under the heat register the other day while vacuuming – a tiny toy dreidel!

Yes, usually dreidels are a Hanukkah thing, I know.  But it’s such a cute little dreidel – note the exciting spinning action shot inset in the photo! *grin*

It’s not ours, so it must have come from a previous tennant.  Funny how it took me a few years to discover it, despite other times I’ve vacuumed under the register.  Or maybe I just did a probability shift to a dreidel-infused universe – sounds more likely. 😀

This photo represents some of the fallen walnuts that I raked out of driveway one morning, but there are many, many more now. Hopefully, they’re mostly out of the tree by now, although it’s hard to tell as the tree is so dang tall!

Each one is about two to two and a half inches in diameter, and most, as you can see, are cracked from impact to the ground. Hopefully, our local squirrels will find this cache and run off with them all as soon as possible.

After almost two months of trying to get our older stove fixed, which included four visits from two different repairmen, a reschedule due to a repairman’s family emergency, a reschedule due to them having ordered the wrong part, they finally came to the conclusion that it would cost more to find the wiring problem on the oven’s spark module than to buy a new stove. So now we have a NEW stove!

Before it broke, the old one had been fully functional, if a bit dated and worn-looking, but the new one is, of course, all shiny, AND has an oven light and oven window!!  (Yes, I am easily excitable – LOL!)

We also learned about having to do an ‘initial burn’ – oven on at 400F for 30 minutes – in order to, some say, ‘cure the insulation’ or ‘burn off the oil coating’ or something.  So we had fans and exhaust and open windows, and it did stink a bit, but not as badly as some of the stories I’d read online.  Whew!  (There’s got to be a better way – you know these kinds of fumes aren’t good when they recommend keeping children and birds away!)

So. Today, I’m going to bake for the first time in two months; am making banana bread as I know how it’s supposed to look and can tell how the oven’s doing temp-wise and all that. Woo Hoo!