Killer tea
While I enjoy the occasional cup of coffee, mostly when I’m at a diner eating some 5 pound grease bonanza, I am a tea man. I don’t rely on either for a morning routine, but I like a cup of tea every now and again if I have some at the house.
I got up today with the dog at 7 am as usual and decided to stay up. Start painting. Practice my daily headstand routine.
(Try it sometime. Near a wall.)
I ate breakfast and soon I was back to work on that water tower painting with the millions of bricks. I’ve painted them and whited them out and gone over them three separate times now and I’m finally getting them how I want them. I think. I pray.
Before I knew it it was 10 am and I wanted a nice cup of green tea. If you ever need to pass time, try painting thousands of 3/8 inch wide bricks one at a time.
I turned the burner on and went out to the corner of the garage where I paint. This is about 10 feet from the stove and the kettle is loud, as most kettles are when they boil. Well apparently the door is made of space-age sound-proof material and I am a space-age retard.
I turned on not the burner with the kettle but the burner with the skillet that had a plastic spatula resting on it from making eggs earlier. Five minutes go by and I heard a faint beeping and wondered what the hell it was.
Shitballs.
I walk into the house to find it filled with acrid grey smoke. BALLS OF SHIT. The smoke alarm has been screaming.
I’ve never even taken time to note where the hell the smoke alarms are in this house and I’ve been here for like nine months. Point to your temple a few times with a wry grin. That’s me.
With my ears swirling I searched for the little round thing on the ceiling. I swat the first thing I could find off the ceiling like King Kong with a pesky helicopter. Wrong device. Whatever the hell that thing is isn’t making the noise that’s making my eyes throb. Turn around, idiot. Got it. I pull the battery out, which… crap I’m going to go put it back in. Hang on…
Ok.
Dammit. Luckily, after having rain fall on Charlotte for over 24 hours… literally, the dogs are outside in the sun that finally decided to show it’s ass.
I’m gonna go get a cup of coffee.
OK, something like this happened to me a few weeks ago! I was back from one of the 400 weddings I’ve been to this summer, and was exhausted to the point of being brain dead, and thought, boy, coffee might wake me up!
At the cottage we’ve got these banged up aluminum old-fashioned drip coffee makers, where you pour hot water in a compartment on the top, it drips over the grounds and into the coffee receptacle below. I put on the kettle to get things started, turned my back on the stove to sit down at the kitchen table, and got into reading the paper.
Yeah, there’s this smoke smell, but I figure that some beetles or spiders have made their way into the stove and are just being incinerated. (The cabin is so seriously on their turf, no matter how clean we keep things, insects find places to live and hide, and who can blame them?)
Anyway, finally I turn around to see that the kettle element is not on, another one is - and it happens to be where my mom placed a plastic bucket that she was using to collect beer cans for recycling. And the thing’s on fire, flames eight inches high, toxic smoke from the plastic filling the air, the bottom melted out like the faces of those Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There was some shrieking, some turning off of the fuse, some throwing of wet dish towels on the inferno, some general freaking out. All quickly resolved (although the element needs to be replaced) but my stovetop dyslexia is making me super conscious about never leaving flammable things on the stove AND about double-checking the element.
Also, I no longer needed the coffee thanks to my entire system coursing with adrenaline. (But I made some anyway.)
Glad to know there are other idiots out there like me.
Before I moved into the place I live at now, I lived with this dude Josh. One day I decided I was going to have a veggie burger for lunch. Tossed it in the pan along with a few slices of bacon. A few minutes later I went outside to take out the trash. I go to open the door to return inside only to find that I have locked myself out of the house. Fuck. I start to panic big time because I have no idea how to get back into the house. I was actually on the phone with the fire department when I realized that there was a huge doggie door in the back, and with a sigh of relief hung up with the fire department and crawled through the door and into the smoke filled house to seize the pan (with what was by then not much more than a black potato chip) off the stove.
Nice Jen. Real nice.
Why I decided to call the fire department instead of just break a window, I have no idea. I was pretty sure nothing awful could really happen, but I wasn’t sure. Also, this incident occurred about 2 weeks after I moved into the house, and about one week after I had left one day and not turned the oven off, only to have my roommate politely remind me of it later. His response was, “well, the house didn’t burn down, so everything is cool.” Ahem.
Anyway, you can’t post about something like this and not expect people to all reply with their stories of similar retardedry.