Patience may pay off

I have a working oven. Yay!!

The repair guy called on Friday and said, "You wanna hear something funny? The part just showed up on my doorstep." I didn't think it was funny; I thought it was about time. He thought it was ironic because two weeks earlier he had turned the whole thing back over to the warranty company. I don't know what that means, "turned it over," although I guess it involves telling them, basically, "I can't get this part. You try;" and maybe it also involves him giving up his fee.

"So what do you want me to do with this?" he said.

What a silly question.

He meant, I guess, are you pursuing other solutions, like getting the oven replaced. But the only option the warranty people had offered so far (only if the part was not delivered by Friday) was sending the defective bit somewhere to get rebuilt. Who knows how long that would've taken.

So I said, "How about if you come fix it."

He came about 10 minutes to five on Monday. At two that afternoon I had called him to say, "Was I supposed to call you about setting up an appointment time? Or were you going to call me? I forget." Turns out he was dealing with some legal difficulties involving back child support, and it was taking most of the day. He told me all about it when he came that evening to replace the erstwhile control board--which took very little time once he actually had it in hand.

I baked chicken for dinner (a lovely recipe that involves shaking the chicken in crushed cornflakes and ranch dressing mix) with baked potatoes (although, since I couldn't start dinner until almost 5:30, we still had to finish the potatoes in the microwave). That night I baked cookies. Mmmm, warm chocolate chip cookies. And I have to say, making my weekly menu list yesterday was unbelievably easy. I made menues for the next TWO weeks, and none of it involves rice (we love rice, but enough is enough).

One thing I do find funny, though, is that my sister-in-law's oven has been broken for four years. They don't miss it, since Nigerian food doesn't involve baking. They use the non-functioning oven for storage.

That's one patience test successfully completed. As for the other, we're still waiting to hear about our future. Will we stay here, will we move? When the company's self-imposed deadline came, at the end of January, they did put out an announcement. It said: We have to recalculate given the current economic conditions. We'll have a town hall meeting in a couple of weeks to announce the plan.

One guy in our ward claims that at this alleged meeting all the employees should sit on one side and all the spouses should sit on the other side. That way the administration won't know which spouse goes with which employee. Then the spouses should speak up and let them have it.

I was trying to remember, have I prayed for patience recently?