I just thought of this and figured it may be interesting. When we were first married my tank was a 40 gallon which was considered pretty big then. I had the tank before we were married so naturally the tank came along with me when my wife and I got our first apartment. That apartment was on the first floor of an attached home and it was the smallest apartment I have ever seen. But we couldn't rub two nickels together to make a dime so it sufficed for a few years. We had one tiny closet in the entire apartment and that was under a stair case. The "living room, dining room and kitchen" was really one small room. The other room was the bedroom. In the part of the apartment we called the dining room, which was really just the tiny entrance into the place we had the fish tank. The tank took up almost a quarter of the hall way/dining area, which had no table, we just called it that to make it sound like we had a dining room. We really had two stools at the kitchen counter as that was all that would fit.
When our Daughter was born, we put her in the same whicker bassinet that I was in when I was born. Luckily it was on wheels because we had to wheel her back and forth to be able to walk past the bassinet and the fish tank.
I am surprised my new wife put up with that for so long and still does.
One day just two days after we moved in I came home from work to find my wife hysterical crying. I said, whats wrong. She said the stove (which was brand new and she never used it yet) blew up right after she closed the oven door to check on some Chinese food she was warming up for dinner. She wanted me to call the stove manufacturer and tell them they almost killed her. There was Chinese food all over the newly painted apartment and the fish tank. Luckily the fish didn't mind the salty food. I inspected the oven and it looked like a pot belly stove. The insulation was coming out and the sides were bent out. The bottom of the oven was also bent down.
In those days you had to turn on the gas to the oven, then light it with a match. Now they are all electric start. I pulled out the stove and started to take it apart to see if I could find the cause of the explosion.
My wife was just yelling about the manufacturer.
Then I found the problem. As I said this was a tiny apartment, (and a tiny stove) My wife was just 18 and we had just came back from our Honeymoon two days prior to this. We also had no money to replace the stove.
I found an exploded can of "PAM" spray in the oven. The stuff you spray in a pan so stuff don't stick. I can tell you that PAM doesn't keep Chinese food from sticking to walls or fish tanks.
She would store stuff in the oven for lack of any other place to put it and that can must have rolled in the back where she didn't see it.
I had to take every part out of that stove, insulation, rivets, everything and straighten it out. I got it looking almost like new and it worked for the next five years until we moved.
This is her then
