Ovens, spiders, and a 6lb banana bread

Last June, my oven decided to do this really insane thing whenever I lit it: giant flames would shoot out everywhere and promptly the kitchen would smell very strongly of gas. Because I’m not exactly handy, I figured that yes the oven is broken, and it would stay broken for a while. I honestly hoped that I would be able to find someone to fix it in a decently prompt manner (adjusting for location and mentality of local population). This did not happen.

Summer passed and I pretty much forgot about the oven not working as it was a million degrees daily and I couldn’t bring myself to prepare anything besides cheese sandwiches and cut up tomatoes.

Fast forward another couple months to now. After pressing the issue to quite a few people and insisting that I would pay to have it fixed so the school wouldn’t need to worry (which I had actually said before, but whatever) I finally got a suggestion: go down to the gas service building and ask around there. (The building happens to be 5 minutes away and I had no clue it existed because it’s surrounded by a big gate and overgrown shrubbery. (I’m sure with all these parenthetical remarks I sound much snarkier than usual. I am. This month is rough.))

I wandered down to the building and immediately had no clue who to ask and what to do. So, I did what I always do in those situations: look extremely sad and pathetic. It worked! A woman said “Miss, what is wrong? What do you need?” I told her about my oven and she marched me upstairs to someone, who handed me off to someone else, who finally brought me to a corner office where a woman took my address and said that a serviceman would be at my house after 3pm.

Around 4:30, my doorbell rings. The serviceman was a fairly jolly man who hummed a wide variety of tunes while tearing my oven to pieces. He asked me questions about America and whether or not we repair our ovens. I began to worry as he muttered things along the lines of “piece of shit oven”. But I didn’t have to worry, because then I heard “Oh, that tends to happen….” He called me into the kitchen and stood there holding this pair of tweezers with a ball of crud at the end. “Look, a spider!” (To my delight, he used a diminutive of the word spider, more on this new fascination later) Apparently, this spider had crawled inside of my oven and built a nice home inside the tube where gas has to circulate. When I lit the oven flame, it burned him up, but his charred remains continued to clog up the small pipe.

I expressed my shock about this and explained my treaty with spiders: I won’t kill them if they will leave me alone. The serviceman then told me “Ha, you think they listen to you. You’re not the owner of this apartment. THEY ARE. Unless you start smoking. Then, they will die and you will be in charge.”

He left shortly after fixing one more minor problem on the stove and telling me that I didn’t have to pay him because it is his job to fix these kinds of things. I gave him some money anyway and he asked for an American gift. I gifted him a magnet from Folly Beach, and managed to keep a hold of my mini-flashlight (I need it! I have such bad night vision!).

In my extremely joyous state, I practically skipped to the store to buy mass quantities of butter and sugar in anticipation of the baking frenzy that was about to ensue. The final product: a triple batch of banana bread baked in one giant pan. The loaf, if you could call it that, weighs approximately 6 pounds. This is absurd. I am proud.

What will I bake next?