When Martin and I first moved into our house I had some trouble with our stove. After living with questionably equipped kitchens I was not used to a fine, expansive stove that actually had all the knobs and buttons that is required for using a stove. When I began cooking on our new stove oftentimes the kitchen would fill with the stinky waft of melting, burning plastic. This eluded us for some time. I thought maybe a plastic handled pan had been shoved in the drawer below the stove. Nope. I thought that maybe there was some sort of plastic ring around the gas burners. Nope. After snooping around and enduring the stink for a few days we discovered what the problem was: the burners on the stove were different sizes! We had a tiny one in the back and two middle of the road sizes as well as one reserved for something called Super Boil. Instead of a superhero akin to the Spleen from Mystery Men, it actually boils water really fast, has a huge radius that disallows the use of smallish pans on its burner. This is where the stink had originated. The heat from the burners was attaching itself to the hardened plastic of the handles of my pans. The heat had also burned/melted the spout on our teapot. Melted it so much that the usual round opening where the water would come out had melted and hardened into a teardrop shape.
The teapot lasted us three years until the day before Thanksgiving; the plastic started to fall off in chunks leaving the metal round thing under it exposed and constantly falling into my coffee or tea. As amusing as this was, we decided to retire the old teapot and buy a new one.
This weekend I spent some quality time at the mall with my bud Sarah. We bought many things, among them a new teapot.