A Friday in Suisun...

Best part of today was clearing off Hawaii our island in the kitchen.  So much stuff crowding out all it's space that I really had to cut and prep dinner on a small cutting board on the mainland...as we call the rest of the kitchen counter space.  Within minutes of getting up I found myself facing a failed coffee machine...our almost trusty SAECO espresso machine was inert when pressed into morning coffee service.  WTF?!  No red light indicators, just power on,light and no coffee machine noise when the coffee machine button is pushed.  Then I noticed that along side the right hand side of the machine was a pile of coffee grounds, Hmmmm and a big "oh shit'!  This led to opening the right hinged panel and discovering a heap of coffee grounds around the mechanism.  Yea gads, what a mess!  This has happened before on this machine and others...what happens is not clear but the mess it leaves behind certainly is!  I have removed the brew unit before on all of these espresso machnies we have had.  It's the easiest on this particular SAECO one.  Upon removing the unit I discovered that it was not in the same position that I have seen on the unit when I did this before.  A sping-like part was fully exposed and after some fooling around with the mechanism discovered that it was apparently out of sync with the way it normally was when powered up in previous disassembles.
I spent the next 1/2 hour cleaning up the grounds from all the places it's not supposed to be. Then I washed the brew unit and wiped up the grounds from where the brew unit is placed in the machine.  That done I reinstalled the brew unit, closed the side panel and attempted to place the grounds container back into the machine, no luck!  So I pulled the contained back out and examined the space it fit into.  It looked fine, si I figured that the brew unit was not installed properly as it was the only other item I had removed from the machine.  I then discovered how the mechanism worked and saw that for it to be out of position it would need rotation of the machines drive motor...that was not going to happen so I rotated the brew unit's mechanism until I could get a click upon inserting the brewq unit back inside the machine.  Then with that done I  used a knife to hold the switch on the grounds container closed...then I closed the side panel and the machine came alive!  Wow!  I won't be tricked like this again, I'll clean out the machine once a week, not once a month or more and maybe forestall this kind of failure.

9 Days Later, the REAL BLUES and my Oven Died

So that week in the last blog had us going almost every night to some venue and watch, listening and dancing to R&B mostly and a bit of blues.  On the Sunday before the Tuesday that the music died at Napa Smith's Brewery.  Something happened to kill the jams on Tuesday night.  Hell if I know, when I last saw Ronnie he was wearing a cap and a striped towel over his head...Arabic-like appearance but it WAS Ronnie!  That was  Halloween night, D'Jeena and her band played at Napa Smith with Ronnie running around ignoring us.  Who knows, we haven't been back since.  Sad.  Frustrating too!

Last week, Wednesday I think, the damned oven lost it's mind.  The hours before it was baking a 29 cent/lb 14lb bird that I had  brined with onion, celery, sage and oregano.  The bird turned out fine, great actually...but the damned oven did the temperature probe thingie, shit, shit, shit and there seems not anyway to reset the bloody thing.  Sooo after much piddling and screwing around we decided a replacement was due.  So off to Amazon, eBay and Craig's List looking for a double oven or even a single of similar duty.  We drifted out amid the rains of the week to the Habitat for Humanity's store and found a Dacor double oven for only 90 bux!  Dacors are some of the MOST expensive ovens and such that you can buy!  Upwards of $6000 for some models! 
 Examples thanks to Google Search...

 We had not the truck so ventured home to check the Dacor with all the usual sources, Consumer Reports, Amazon etc. Only to discover this model had a terrible and lengthy list of problems!  Sooo off to look in Craig's List Sacramento and there it was, the oven of my dreams, a GE Profile 27" beauty!  And, the price?  $390 bux!

These things cost boys and girls, this one lists for 1899 USD!  So off to West Sacramento we went.  We arrived at the super nice Ukrainian couples residence about and hour later and there it was!  In perfect, nearly not used condition!  Beautiful!  So with a bit of tugging and groaning loaded it in the truck's bed, tied it down and off we went!  The next day we connected with a neighbor, Mary and her son, he is a brawny, strong-as-an-ox guy that we both have great respect for.  He's friendly and capable as they come...We get our eggs

from him!  The next few days were spent sorting out how we were going to house the beast.  The oven sat in our living room.  As I was checking the necessary cabinetry, I saw many part numbers that indicated the size of the oven.  Up to this point it seemed to be a 27" oven...but, as it turned out it was a 30" one so it would not fit in out existing homemade funky cabinet!  So the search was on for new cabinetry to replace the now too small one!  Damnit! Shit, shit, shit! For about 400 USD a cabinet designed for a 30" oven was available.  After sorting out all the available options we decided to rework the existing one, it's not pretty but it fits the scene in our kitchen.   So starting Saturday I began the rework.  Now the cabinet has the oven and our extensive collection of cookbooks.  All book shelves had to be trimmed as the new stove ate the space alloted for the cookbooks, oh joy!  Then Sunday afternoon after several delays because of my difficulty with the electrical connections we (Ronnie and his mate Matt) slid the new unit into it's cabinet!  From then til this afternoon I've been deconstructing and reconstructing that bloody cabinet. Many screws, drilling and sawing the shelving unit that is the rest of the cabinet configuration.  It's nearly done, needs some painting and caulk to hide the less wonderful details but...we have a new stove and it works well having baked 6 loaves yesterday to brown beautiful.

I'm really happy for the end result..