Saturday 2 August 2008

Trial And Error, My Friends, Trial And Error

Soooooooooooooooooo anyway I set fire to my kitchen the other day...

Not like in a big way. It was just the oven. I mean, just the griller of the oven.

I was making lamb chops and those things spit like bastards, so they were sparking little bits o' fat up at the gas element and I decided to take a "eh what's the worse thing that could happen?" approach rather than panicking and looking on like a nervous nancy. People are too nervous these days, don't you think?

Apparently one of the worst things that could happen is the fat that has been slowly gathering around the chops can finally catch fire, leading to a tiny re-enactment of Sodom and Gomorrah* as fatty spitty fire rained down upon the hapless chops.

It was really quite instructional.
I realised that I hadn't gotten around to buying a fire extinguisher for the house**.
I figured throwing water inside the grill would be tricky and a bad idea.
I noticed in time that if I pulled the grill out to extinguish the alleged 'fire'*** I would melt the knobs off the front of the stove...
So with my mad improvisational skills I took a pizza tray, shoved it into the grill over the burny thingy and bits of unfortunate and victimised meat and successfully extinguished the tiny tiny blaze.
Also I found out that meat that has caught a little bit on fire can still be quite delicious and still maintain a light flavour of seasoning and pepper.

It's the second episode in my latest series of Xtreme Housekeeping Events.

The first was flooding out my local Laundromat.
Technically I can't claim full credit for that one though as it had more to do with a faulty washing machine than it had to do with me but still... Having a washing machine jittering and spewing water and suds from both ends, freaking out both young and old alike was quite entertaining.
I do own a washing machine which should exempt me from the Laundromat experience but apart from the fact it was a little venerable to start with, it got dropped a little bit between the moving van and my latest place and has never actually, y'know, worked again.
Hence the local Laundromat and the joys that it brings****.

The simplest solution to this particular dilemma would be to buy a brand new washing machine.
That just seems a little extreme.
I don't really want to go into an electronics store because the barely controlled desperation and resentment lurking in the eyes of a salesperson on commission is second only to that seen behind the eyes of clowns.
There is also the little surly old person voice that has muttered from within me since mine birth that keeps on insisting that appliances aren't what they used to be and that the minute I buy something it'll either break down or be featured on a hard hitting news program as the sole cause of global warming.
This is, as I'm sure is obvious, a lovely lovely excuse for not having to go shopping and wade through a sea of minor differences between products and lies with the end result of being allowed to give other people money for an object that may or may not get dropped a bit on the way up the stairs...
Ah well. I expect I'll snap sooner or later.
Probably the next time someone comes up behind me whilst I'm folding sheets and tells me that I smell nice and not at all like socks.


*Just the 'fire and brimstone from above' imagery, not the ridiculous twitchy-eyed behavioural accusations and blatantly discriminatory bit.
**No! No! Bad! Buy!
***OK, yeah, it was really fire.
****Eg: Getting to see other people's smalls, being accused of stealing someone's drying after they'd only left it in there for seven hours whilst they rustled someone else's cattle (just going by smell here), wondering how on Earth you can raise a kid to be morbidly obese by the time they're, what? Seven? I can't quite tell...

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