we didn't electrocute ourselves or have an electrical fire.  On the bad side, it turns out that our oven is at least 25 years old, has too many things wrong with it to be worth fixing if we could, and we couldn't get the parts for it anyway - and the lower oven is unuseable due to corrosion which would allow any spills to get to the heating element.   So we need a new oven.  The repairman strongly recommended that I not use the lower, smaller oven at all now (which I had been doing, as it did heat up) which leaves us with the stove top (a separate unit) and the slow cookers.   I am thankful for those.

I do hope that perhaps very soon something will come up on Freecycle.