It all started, when one day...

I decided to make pasta from scratch.  I had recently stolen - I mean, borrowed, my Grandma's pasta attachment to my Kitchen Aid Mixer and was dying to try my hand at homemade pasta.

So, I got out the flour, salt and eggs and started mixing.  Except that I was one egg short of the recipe I was using and the dough wasn't coming together, it was just really dry and in little chunks.  However, undaunted, I simply added water.  Now I had a rather stiff, chunky mix of flour and eggs.  My kneading wasn't making the dough "soft and smooth." 

But, I wasn't to be stopped so easily.  Oh no, I was making pasta that night no matter what.  I decided I would just run the dough through the roller attachment and see what happened.  Except I didn't have instructions on how to attach said roller.  That's alright, I'm pretty good at figuring things out on my own.  After a little bit of critical thinking I had the attachment on my stand mixer and was ready to insert my dough. 

The dough was tough, I apparently did not have the attachment on correctly and the whole thing (attachment and dough) started flipping itself in circles with the dough making a smacking noise.  My kids started laughing hysterically.  My own personal cheerleaders.

Finally I figured out the attachment was locked into place.  So, I locked and started shoving my dough through the roller.  It came out looking like this:

Yeaahhh....  However, I was going to have pasta no matter what, so I thought I would just skip the rolling out process and run it straight through the spaghetti cutter.  In case you were ever wondering if this is acceptable, it's not.  In fact, it's a very, very bad idea.  I'm just lucky I didn't break anything. 

Now what?  My kids were still laughing and cheering me on (so, I thought) and I really wanted to have homemade pasta that night.  I stood there thinking for a moment casually gathering up all the scraps of dough when I realized the dough was a lot softer.  All the work I had put it through had softened it quite a bit.  I ran it through the roller one more time and got something that resembled the soft, flat sheets that was in the picture, if one used their imagination greatly...  I then ran the sheets through the spaghetti cutter and voila - I had something that resembled spaghetti!

Yay me!  I turned around to proudly show my children what a little bit of determination and hard work can do when I found this...

Apparently the laughing and cheering was not for me after all... Water was EVERYWHERE. 

At this exact moment a rather over-zealous splash sent water flying into my vicinity of the kitchen.  Now I was covered in water, the stove was covered in water, even the dining room table was covered in water.  I figured there was nothing to be done right now, the kids were soaked, the floor was soaked, might as well keep making dinner.

I started to boil the water on the stove.  Barely a minute after turning on the burner my GAS stove became possessed.  It tried to light itself.  The clicking got louder and louder as I frantically tried turning off burners that weren't even on in the first place.  I suddenly had an image of a fireball erupting from the kitchen and made a quick decision.  We must evacuate.  It is a GAS stove after all.

I shoved the kids out the front door while calling Carlin and flipping breakers trying desperately for the ticking noise to stop.   Finally I got the ticking noise to stop and decided we would wait for Carlin to get home outside playing in a box.

After all this one would think I should have given up.  That it was fate, something telling me to not make pasta that night.  But Carlin unplugged the stove, we started it manually with a lighter and were soon eating homemade pasta with canned spaghetti sauce (I did have to stop somewhere, obviously fresh sauce was out of the question).  It was delicious.

We later found out that the water from the splashing had caused the lighter on the stove to short-circuit, hence the ticking noise.  A few hours of drying and our stove and oven were back in business.