New House

We spent the week of December 15-19 getting into the new house.  New Chilean homes come without kitchen cabinets or appliances.  A surprise to us.  And our house has no central heating!  One of the other senior missionary couples came from afar (an hour and a half from us) to help us (Keith really) install the cabinets, etc.  Now I have a gem of a kitchen.  Everything works except for the stove which needs to be lit -- it's gas.  Except for the cabana we lived in for the first 3 weeks we lived here, I haven't used a gas stove since 1972 when we moved form the Salt Lake house to the Denver house.  But the Salt Lake house's stove had an electric starter so I didn't use matches.  Chilean stoves use matches to light.  So for the first day Keith lit the stove so I could cook!  It wasn't until we got a flame gun (like you use for the bar-b-que) that I felt like I could light the stove.  I had singed my hand too often at the cabana!  And yesterday (2 weeks after we moved in) we used the oven and Keith had to light it!  Our daughter Susan is sending me an oven thermometer so I can use the oven without burning the cookies like I did yesterday!  I will get better with the oven.  Even if the oven is so small that I cannot use the cookie sheet that I was given by a senior missionary who was going home unless I put it in on a slant!

A funny story about lighting the stove with matches:  I told Keith that I needed to buy some longer matches, and then I wouldn't scorch my hand.  So we looked for longer matches at the store and bought a longer box that looked like the matches would be twice as long as the ones I was using.  However, when we got home and opened the box, it had two nice, neat rows of matches the same small size as the ones I already had!  So I learned that the size of the box does not mean that the contents are different in size.  Hence the flame gun!

My "giant" matches

This is our house heater -- the ugly black thing in the corner!  But it is better than no heat at all and it really does heat the whole house, which tells you how small the house is! 

Our house with Barbara at the door