Well, now isn't this a fine kettle of fish

It's December 8, and I am supposed to be baking cookies. And that's what I was doing this morning. I have dough for two kinds of cookies in my refrigerator waiting to be baked. I have two batches of bar-pan type cookies that I baked this morning waiting to be cut. So why am I not actually baking any of the waiting cookies? Well, that would be because the oven kind of blew up just as the second batch of this morning's cookies was finishing up. Ok, maybe "blew up" is a little exaggerated, but the heating element did start arcing (which caused a very tiny fire) and it shorted out the oven control board. Our oven is toast. And a new oven was not on my Christmas shopping list. I guess it is now, though. With limited funds for this type of purchase, I went shopping at HomeDepot.com and found a range that looked promising, and it was even on sale. We checked it out tonight after supper, and while I don't love it, I can live with it, for a few years at least. They don't have any in stock, though, so the earliest we could get it would be Wednesday. I happened to find the same model at Lowe's -- in stock, but not on sale. If they will give us Home Depot's sale price, we'll take it, because there is no place one can go to do one's baking when the oven is on the blink, as opposed to being able to take the laundry to the laundromat when the washer or dryer is on the fritz, and you don't realize how much you use the oven until it's not available. At least I didn't.