Fracking oven!!!!!!!

I really do love my new kitchen. I'm sure it's bigger than many others I've had, and it contains my prized (rented) possession...the dishwasher (yes, I have become a slave to modern consumer conveniences...and I'm not ashamed of it!) But it also unfortunately contains the world's most useless (fracking!!!) oven!! It feels me with such rage that I'm bordering on kicking it. Oh who am I kidding? I have kicked..several times. See, I come from the DIY school of physical brutality...if something is broken or faltering, my first instinct is to kick or hit it in the hopes that this will make it work again. And this technique does, on occasion, work. We had a tv for quite some time that would lose its picture unless you hit it to make it come back. When watching tv in bed (and no one could be bothered getting up) we'd throw shoes at it in the hopes of hitting it at the right angle and with sufficient force to make it come back on. In the end the tv died properly, and ok, that might have been because of the large hole that we'd ended up smashing into the top of it. Oops. Oh well...
Anyway, as I said, the annoying (godforsaken) oven was kicked the other night, but to no avail. The sodding thing: A. burns everything (and I know I do have many flaws in the kitchen, but burning things is not one of my regular failings!) and B. it turns its bloody (demonic) self off in the middle of cooking things!!! Arrgh! I was baking pizzas the first time this happened. The whole thing just shut down and then about 15 mins later came back on with a flash of blinking green lights ("oh, you've decided to play now have you? well that's just fine - I've already decided to make pasta instead so bollocks to you, you ridiculous excuse for an oven!") It also did it while I was making bread yesterday morning. Fortunately it hasn't turned itself off while I've been baking a cake, but I can only imagine that would effectively ruin a cake - causing collapses and all manner of enraging yelling. Makes life very frustrating when you love to bake and cook and your oven won't play ball, no?! Our property management company are a bit (entirely) useless too, so this is going to take weeks to get any sort of resolution on. Deep sigh, sip of wine...

In the meantime, expect to see a lot of stove-cooked meals in our house!

Actually, I haven't done a lot of cooking lately, because I've started two new jobs at opposite ends of England, so that's sort of killing my kitchen time. I must figure out a way of managing this though, because I miss having that creative outlet. Actually the one thing I am seriously considering is buying a breadmaker. I've always made a lot of our bread myself, and I love making it by hand - the hands-on beating and shaping of dough is fun (I think). Plus I'm of the personal belief that most mass-produced bread is utterly crap. It's even worse in the UK than at home - it's either doughy and so dense you could knock someone on the head with it, or it's already stale when you buy it. Either way, grotty and I'd rather do without. But unless I take to making bread late at night (which I suppose is actually a possibility, but it would require considerable organisation on my part, and that's really where I fall down in that idea), I don't think I'm going to have much time for dough. That fills me with quite a bit of sadness, I have to say, so I'm wondering if a breadmaker might be the way to go.

So tell me, can you still be creative with a breadmaker, or does it take all the fun out of bread-making??