Goodbye Old Friend

So, I'm saying good bye to our stove. It was not really great from the beginning so no love lost really. I must say when we moved into our first home,the one we still live in, I was a little apprehensive about having a gas stove and range, but Mike would have nothing else so I had little choice since he does a lot of the cooking around here! I had visions of me blowing the house up trying to get this thing lit, but gas stoves have come a long way since the one I remember growing up with at the lake. that one required you light it with a match each time and that was a little scary to me! But the one we had was not anything like that, it had a pilot light that was on all the time and you simply had to turn the nob until the flame popped up. And after I adjusted to cooking with it, I will certainly NEVER go back to electric!! I mean when you turn on a gas burner, it is immediately hot, when you turn it off, it is immediately cool. You can turn the burner off and leave the pot sitting there and not worry about it continuing to cook. That feature I really love, especially since we don't have a lot of extra counter space to set hot pots on. However, we have been having problems with the oven part for about a year now, something with the element firing on and off rapidly. We could never get the oven to preheat without turning on one of the stove burners and even then it took forever. We usually ended up turning on the broiler and getting the oven hot enough and then switching to regular cooking to maintain the temperature. So we finally broke down and bought a new Range. We decided to go stainless since we just replaced our counter top microwave with an over the range and it is stainless. It has a convection oven which has turned out to be awesome!! It cooks in about half the time that is required and is great for bread and cookies. So, I say good bye to our first stove, a not so faithful friend in the end!