What Else Can Happen?

 Yesterday evening, Jill and I had a very pleasant on-line meeting with a group of friends. We discussed TV, movies, books, and life in general (no politics). About 7:15, we said our goodbyes and went to the kitchen to start dinner. We were broiling some hot dogs in our electric range.

About 60 seconds in, I heard a loud buzzing from the stove and opened the oven door, to see the broiler heating element shooting sparks from what appeared to be a break in it. I turned off the broiler and the sparks continued, so I went to the basement and tripped the breaker for the power to the stove. That ended it...for the moment. 

We decided to get sandwiches from Wawa for dinner instead.

Some background: A few years back, we had a similar short occur in the main oven heating element. We had it replaced. In 2019, the hinge on the oven door was damaged, such that it will simply fall all the way open when released. We have been meaning to replace the entire appliance...and then the pandemic and lockdown occurred.

An odd thing about our stove: When it was installed (before we bought the house), it was "hard-wired" into the electrical system, as opposed to being plugged in. I don't know if that was standard some 25 years ago, but it means when we replace the stove, we need to have an electrician disconnect it and probably install a socket for the plug on any new stove. Oh, and it has to be an electric...there's no gas line to our house.

We'll probably be doing a lot of crock-pot and grill meals for the next few weeks.

More Home Memories

Last weekend, I posted a photo of what the house I grew up in looked like in 1940...and what it looked like for most of the time I lived there.

Today, I've got a picture of what it looked like in the 1980s, after new siding, new windows and a new front porch.

It still looked basically like that the last time I saw it in November of 2019. I don't know if my sister intends to make changes to the exterior as well as the ones I know she's made inside.

Memories of Home

Thanks to a link in a Facebook post, I was able to find this picture:

That is 70 DuBois Ave, on Staten Island, the house I grew up in (but not where I was born; my parents moved there in early 1953, just before I turned one year old), as it looked when the City of New York took photos for tax purposes 1939.

It still looked pretty much like that most of my school years; the siding and front porch were replaced, as I recall, in the late 1960s. And by the time I knew it, the driveway on the right no longer existed. The old wooden garage it led to was still standing though, used as storage by my family until it literally fell down in the 1970s. The most interesting thing about it was that the previous owner, who did use the garage and driveway, had decorated the interior walls with all his old license plates, going all the way back to this era. I suppose he owned the house when this photo was taken.

For the record, the room I shared with my younger brother was the front second floor window on the left; the one on the right was a "dressing room" for when our bedroom had been the "master bedroom." It was basically extra storage space for us. The rear window on the left indicates where my parents' room was....and my sister's room was all the way in the right rear corner.

My sister owns the house now; she bought it from my mother who continued to live there until just before her death earlier this year. It's being remodeled for my sister to rent or sell in the future.