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Put me out to pasture--it will be safer for all but the pasture
Earlier this week, I turned 31, and clearly my age is catching up with me. I seem to be going senile, so it's probably a good thing I'm getting married so that I'll have someone to take care of me.
As I mentioned, last week was pretty busy, with a lot of grading to do. On Monday after dinner, I put some water in the tea kettle in order to caffienate and sat down to do some grading. Soon, however, the dog was pestering me to go outside, so I put on my iPod and leashed her up to go. As I mentioned last month, I've taken to listening to podcasts, even on little walks like this. On Monday, I was listening to a segment on "This American Life" with David Sedaris talking about how it's apparently fairly common for people to defecate in retail stores. His boyfriend worked at the Gap after high school and apparently it was a fairly common sight to find such leavings in the fitting rooms. On his book tour, Sedaris has been gathering such tales, with some of them making that seem fairly tame: from doing one's business in the midst of those circular clothes racks to aisles of the supermarket, apparently shit happens.
I felt a mixture of shock and awe that impelled me to immediately share this with Lauren (she corroborated these stories from her time working retail over the holidays). As we finished listening to this show, Lauren asks "Do you sell something burning?"
Unfortunately, I did. It had a vaguely electrical smell to it, so I immediately checked the speakers I'd hooked up to my iPod, but it was nothing so straightforward as that. We traced the smell to the kitchen, where we discovered that the culprit was only electrical in the most general sense: there, on our electric range, my tea kettle had been turned into a little inferno. Apparently, I hadn't close the top tightly, so the pot never whistled. The interior of my tea kettle was apparently on fire. For good measure, the plastic handle was in the process of melting off.
My reaction was eminently mature--and by mature, I mean disoriented and panicky, as in "senile." Hey, that's mature, right? Fortunately, Lauren kept her wits about her, grabbed an oven mitt and a cookie sheet and got the whole smoke-spewing on-fire-metal and molten-plastic mess out of the house and into the back yard where it could set leaves on fire and, potentially burn down the whole block. She managed to put out the leaves though, and the concrete sidewalk proved not so incendiary as the lawn.
Despite the fact that it was in the 30s or 40s at best, we opened every window in the house trying to expel the foul stench. We were mostly successful, too, until Lauren brought the burn victim back inside to examine its deformity and take pictures for posterity. It turned out still to be giving out noxious fumes, so rather than succumb to those, we spent the next several hours with the windows open, risking hypothermia to avoid asphyxiation. Decisions, decisions.
As I said at the top, it's fortunate that I'll soon have a wife to restrain me from some idiocies and be around to secure photographic documentation of others.