Cracked Cooktop

Purple t-shirt for Emmie-Cille, and a purple dress for Addie-Laur, and not-pictured, a purple sweater for Mama too. Addie couldn’t be convinced those black boots were a bit much with a light cotton dress, so my girl was ready for combat today! 🤣 And another stop for some gas station breakfast sammies on the way to school.

My almost-pre-teen went directly to her room to watch videos on her tablet when we got home tonight, but my sweet little toddler girl wanted to be near Mama all night. She wanted to watch me cook, and then dragged her stool over to the stove to get a better look. She helped me shake in the seasonings, and the soy sauce, and even took a little turn to stir all by herself too. She was so precious about it.

We made egg-roll-in-a-bowl together tonight, for another low-carb dinner. I did make a pot of jasmine rice in my rice cooker, and the rest of the family had normal amounts, but I just had a teeny little bit in my bowl tonight.

Extra green onions on top for me, and sesame seeds for all, and it turned out really yummy! I’ve made this a few times before, but it had been a while. The girls ate it, but didn’t love it, but Jeff and I both really liked it.

But towards the end of cooking, I realized there was a crack on my cooktop right at the edge. So I picked up the skillet and realized it extended up through the entire front burner. I have no idea how it happened, but it’s now unusable. I don’t think I’ve ever really shown it before or explained it specifically, but we don’t have a typical range/oven situation, but a cooktop on top of the counter/cabinet, and a separate oven over by the fridge. It was like that when we moved in, and ours is the only house I’ve ever seen something like this. So I guess the upside is that we don’t have to replace a whole range, but we do still have to replace this ceramic cooktop. They’re priced anywhere from about $300-$600, so looks like we’re gonna have to make a hefty purchase in our near future. Jeff climbed under there to check the details and specs so we would know what to look for and he started researching.

It was hard to get a picture of, so I took one and then highlighted it on my phone…

Oh but if you look closely you can definitely see the crack from this angle and the way it’s kind of indented downwards into itself. (And you can see Addie in the background, still sticking close by Mama, investigating with me.)

Then Jeff colored on it with a dry erase marker, and kinda half-way wiped it off, but the red still shows up in the crack, so you can see where it goes. He saw some home inspector do this online, and it did work enough for the outline of the crack to show up in the photo.

He was researching earlier and already found about 10 links to send me to check out. But I’ve gotta go wash up the dishes now, and then maybe we’ll sit down and check out some options, and hopefully we find a good one. Luckily, Jeff says it’ll be easy enough to replace himself, so hopefully we won’t run into any issues during that process.

Plus, his car is still not working (well, it runs, but the engine is still smoking), and there’s a part on our HVAC unit that needs to be replaced as well. So that’s THREE things we have to deal with, all pretty much immediately. Apparently bad things come in three’s, so there’s are three and fingers crossed we don’t have anything else pop up… Or else we’ll have to start a Go Fund Me for all of this, or sell chocolate as a fundraiser for all these repairs! 🤣