February 27, 2009

Adventure With An (Almost) Oven Fire

Yesterday Emily wanted to have her famous pasta salad for dinner. It's simple in its process and yet epic in its scope.* It's usually served vegetarian, but sometimes we will add chicken. This time we decided to do that. Since it's a cold dish, it's best to cook the chicken early and put it in the fridge so that it can cool down. So I started cooking the chicken at about 2:15. It takes 40 minutes to cook.

Around 2:40 I decided I was going to have a beer, because I'm unemployed so what else am I going to do with my afternoon? As I go to open it I hear a sparking sound coming from the direction of the oven. After comically saying "That's...not a...good sound,"** I turned and saw that the inside of the oven was bright orange. Thinking the oven was on fire, I quickly turned it off, and the sound stopped. I waited a few seconds and opened the door. I was greeted by smoke pouring out. I looked inside and saw that a small part of the bottom heating element was glowing orange. I took the chicken out and put it in our toaster oven to finish cooking. I left the oven door open to cool it down faster so I could see what happened. After it cooled, I saw this:



Part of the element had melted. I went over to our landlord and told him about it. He's going to get a replacement element for us this weekend. We'll be out of town, but I told him to come on in anyway so we can use the oven soon. The stove top works fine, but we're making lasagna next week (complicated in its process, but still epic in its scope), so we need an oven.

Moral of the story: drinking in the afternoon prevents oven fires.***



* Ninja Roooooooooopes

** "Give my regards to St. Peter. Or whoever has his job, but in Hell."

*** The More You Know

2 comments:

  1. Not since Terry Pratchett have I laughed because of footnotes. ^_^

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  2. Update: we got a new element this afternoon. When he took the old one out, I got a better look at it. The side that we could see was bad, but the other side was worse. I seriously think we were very close to having a fire. But thanks to my upcoming alcoholism I was able to stop it.*

    *The More You Know

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