Ah Easter. Another one has come and gone. This year was just more eventful than usual. I had planned a big ham dinner, with all the trimmings, homemade rolls with parmesan and garlic powder on the top. (My brother, who came up with them has dubbed them “crack” rolls because they are so addicting) raspberry cheesecake, salad, mashed potatoes, and of course my version of ambrosia salad. We were exhausted the night before, so the baskets didn’t get filled until late on Easter Morning. Then we discovered that the bacon I was going to use for breakfast had been used the night before for dinner (I totally thought that we had more bacon than we did). So it prompted us to have an impromptu breakfast at our favorite restaurant for breakfast. We got there around 10:00 am which was perfect because it was on the tail end of the breakfast rush. We had a cantankerous waiter, (I think this is because he saw 4 kids and assumed we would be bad tippers, what he didn’t know is that I am a generous tipper, and will tack on more if the wait staff goes above and beyond, which sadly he did not). Everything was simply amazing.


With our bellies full, we returned home to continue the Easter festivities. I hid eggs in the back yard for the kids, talked to my Mom for a while, and then the power went out. I started to panic just a bit because I was planning on starting the ham and rolls around 2:00, so we could eat by 4:30. Well, when I called our Electric Company, they informed me that we may not even have power until then. So we decided to actually do some spring cleaning, as it was still a beautiful albeit windy day outside (which of course is what knocked out the power in the first place). Thankfully the power was only out for an hour or so, which saved us from having fruit for dinner.

The ham was not quite warm enough. The potatoes that I had frozen earlier in the week, took an hour and a half to reheat using a double boiler. (Yep still have no microwave, and have no plans to replace it.) The rolls were fantastic however, and the foolproof ambrosia salad was very tasty. I forgot to chill the cider until the last minute so it was a little warm, and the cheesecake (a new recipe I was trying) had overcooked. But it was the time we spent together that was what made the day special.

We headed off to bed, congratulating ourselves on having a pretty great day despite the circumstances, when we heard the dryer making a horrible grinding/screeching noise (rather like nails on a chalkboard) it had been doing it off and on, but it had a new growl to it. I went to see if I could jiggle the drum, as it sometimes stops the noise. I then restarted the dryer with the door open, which alerted me to the fact that our dryer was arcing with each turn of the drum (this was responsible for the new noise. I turned off the dryer; in time to witness the heating element was turning on by itself! We unplugged it, to prevent a fire, then tackled it this morning, and luckily I am married to a very handy man, because he was able to discover that the ball bearing in the back had seized, due to lack of lubrication, and the plastic housing had melted over it creating friction (thus causing the unpleasant screeching noise). And when we were jiggling the drum, we had caught the back of it on the heating element, so with each turn; it was catching it and causing the arcing, and the element to start up on its own. We thoroughly cleaned the inside of the dryer, found evidence of small fires caused by errant lint (scary no?), he bought more lubricant for under $4 and put the whole thing back together, which now runs like a dream.