Just in Case You Thought it was all Fun and Games...

   On Sunday, we were in the final stages of preparations for our weekly Sunday Supper with students. I turned on the oven and took the two pans of lasagna out of the refrigerator that Jonathan and I assembled earlier in the afternoon.  All was going well until I opened the door to put in the lasagna to bake.  No heat!  How could that be?  I've used the ovens a couple of times since we've been here (We have dinner at home most nights, but my new, best friend is a Dutch oven allowing me to make most meals on the stovetop.  It might come home in my suitcase, but it weighs about 25 pounds!) so I understand that I have to switch on several switches to complete the circuits.  Everything was switched on, but no electricity was getting to the oven.  Ugh!  Students are coming - this is not in my schedule!

   After both Tommy and I unsuccessfully looked around for a central fuse box, I decided to go ask the advice of the one neighbor that we've met.  We introduced ourselves to them a couple of weeks ago but ran into them on our way out to church on Sunday morning.  They were on their way to run a family road race which included crossing streams with knee-deep water!  Since the we had just talked to them, I thought they would be a logical next stop.

   They were so friendly, coming over to help us find the well-hidden breaker box and finding the correct switch to switch.  Unfortunately, that did not completely solve the problem, so she offered to let me cook our dinner in her oven!  It all worked out fine and students were well-fed, commenting that they appreciated being able to go back for more food.  It sounds like the dorms here are quite strict on how much food they will serve each student and there is no going back for seconds.

   After all was said and done with dinner, we thought we had a very minor oven issue that we would address on Monday morning.  However, after we were all asleep, the burglar alarm for the house started going off.  It was like having a police siren for an alarm clock!  Mind you, we had never set a burglar alarm nor did we have any information about it when we were jolted awake.  We attempted for several minutes to disarm the alarm, but it only continued blaring inside and outside the house.  We kept expecting angry or helpful neighbors to show up at our door but they must have dismissed us as "those" neighbors.

   Tommy, using our new knowledge of the breaker box, did find a way to cut power to the alarm inside the house, but the outside continued to annoy the neighbors.  After tracking down a 24 hour service number for the alarm and waiting for the technician to call me back, with his VERY heavy Scottish accent that the alarm would shut itself off after 15 minutes but it seemed like this had been going on for an hour, but while I was talking with him, the alarm shut itself off.

On Monday morning, we did communicate with the home's owner who is also a professor at St Andrews, but on leave this year, and she gave us the contact information for her electrician.  

Update:  Tuesday morning - The electrician did come out and was able to fairly quickly fix the the problems.   The most interesting part is that the oven light went out which made the circuit breaker shut off.  Because the circuit breaker shut off, the digital clock on the front of the oven went back to 12:00 when the breaker was turned back on.  In order to get the oven working, we needed to reset the clock!  Would never have guessed that!  All in all, we are back in business and know a little more about how to solve problems that we may come across.