Odd Uses for Small Jell-o Boxes

One summer day in 1989 (or so) my mother was having a very bad day.  And my brother and I were not cooperating peacefully to get the dinner dishes done.  There were a lot of dishes, as I remember it, because my dad had been working cattle or something, and there were extra working men over for dinner (dinner that she probably wasn't very happy to be cooking, now that I think about it).  My brother and I argued a bit too long, a bit too loudly, and I think my dad probably did something to frustrate her too, resulting in making my mom lose her temper.  She threw this lovely teflon electric frying pan against the wall of the kitchen and one of the plastic legs zinged off and landed in the garbage can.  My mother was mad about that, too.  She let out a string of explicatives in her loudest, shrill voice.  When she calmed down a bit she discovered that the frying pan tipped violently down in the corner where the missing leg had vanished.   The frying pan was essentially useless.  All the butter, pancake batter or other substances ran right down into the corner and didn't cook.

But not all was lost.  After a bit of trial and error a few days later, she discovered that a small jell-o box happened to be the exact perfect height to balance the frying pan.  When I was home over the weekend, my mother decided to cook up a few pancakes for her grandchildren, and she pulled out the crippled frying pan.  I giggled.  And took a picture.  There's nothing like a jell-o box.