There’s always good news along with bad news it seems. The good news is, I am getting a new stove! Since we moved to N.C., I’ve had an electric stove and I’ve hated it! In ten years time, I’ve eventually learned to work with it but never really grew to love it. I always yearned for the blue flames of a gas stove. Last December the darn electric stove finally conked out. Well, it’s been trying to conk out for a while but it hadn’t coincided with when we could afford to buy a replacement stove. This time around, when we got down to two small eyes working, and enough money to buy another stove, we both had that gleam in our eyes when we said let’s go for it!

Since that decisive date, I’ve had visions of me in front of the gas stove cooking Christmas dinner. That didn’t happen. New Year’s dinner? That didn’t happen either. Here I am going on the tenth day of the New Year and still hadn’t happen. Worse, I don’t even have the crappy electric stove anymore! Yep, no stove. Before they took the old stove away and delivered my shiny new gas stove, I cooked a roast duck and baby back ribs to tide us over for the weekend. You see, they took the crappy stove away last Friday and I was thinking I’d be cooking up a storm on the new stove come Monday. WRONG!!

Here it is, it’s Wednesday and still no new stove. The gas lines have been connected but now the hold up is the inspection. Apparently, a city inspector needs to come and take a look at the newly connected gas line before they can hook my stove up to it. In the mean time, we have been without home cooked food since Monday night.

So that’s how we get to the night when we went to three restaurants.

First, it was just going to be Pizza Hut because I had promised The Clone that I would get her pizza when she was whining for pizza on Monday night and I made her eat left overs instead because I was still being optimistic and thinking I’d be cooking dinner by Tuesday. So we got two large pizzas for the five of us; one meat lovers and one supreme. I was happy. They were happy. Hubby can live with it, so he’s happy.

BUT, the pizza took a little longer than expected and while we were waiting for our pizza to get done, I suddenly had a hankering for some soup. So I said rather off handedly, “I have a taste for soup. Too bad that Chinese restaurant next to Pizza Hut had closed for business.” to which Jade helpfully said, “oh but we can stop at the Vietnamese place, Kim Son! It’s on the way home and their pho is really good and it’s only seven dollars.” Wow, that sounded good to me, so after we got our pizza, we were on our way to Kim Son. So we get to the restaurant, and Jade says, “oh mom, do you know they also serve bubble teas? can I get one?” I was feeling a bit manipulated, but what the heck, I’m getting me some pho! So I said yes, before I found out each bubble tea costs over $4! and of course there’s three of them, plus my pho, you do the math. But, they were happy. I left them in the restaurant to wait for our order and I thought I’d go talk to hubby who was waiting in the car.

So we’re standing by the car talking and wouldn’t you know it, we caught a whiff of barbecued pork coming from the restaurant next door, Hog Heaven! At this point, husband can’t live with just pizza anymore, he’s gotta have him some pork and fried chicken and he won’t be happy until he gets it! So I make my way over to yet another counter and order up the pork bbq and fried chicken combo with a side of green beans and turnip greens. It did smell heavenly. So now everyone was happy.

We took our loot home and pigged out. But I still don’t got a stove!