Perfect Moment

You might not think that waking up at 4:30 in the morning could lead to a perfect moment, but in this case it did. Upon waking up so early on Monday, I went downstairs to read a book--and it was perfectly delightful (Close to Famous by Joan Bauer, if you want to go read it for yourself). It left me with a big smile on my face, and after completing that lovely book, I headed back upstairs and crawled into bed beside Adam, who generates a wonderful amount of body heat, thus making curling up to him and getting toasty warm another one of my favorite things to do. So, perfectly satisfied with life, having completed a great book and then getting to cuddle up to my wonderful husband, I drifted back to sleep--although the feeling was so nice, it almost ruined it to fall asleep.

How I Almost Burned Down My Apartment

Adam and I moved recently and we've been getting all settled into our new apartment, and we haven't been doing much cooking (plus, I really love frying pans, so almost everything I have cooked has been a stove top meal). We did do a trial run with a batch of muffins a week or so ago just to test the oven. Well, it worked fine, other than that something appeared to be burning and we set off the smoke alarm. Well, we figured the previous tenants had spilled something up and not cleaned up very well--especially since they didn't exactly clean the rest of the apartment very well. We didn't see any large spills, so I dismissed as being something small that would be taken care of in this one experience.

However, this morning, I decided to throw some food in the oven, figuring I'd get something cooking while I blow-dried my hair. However, as the oven was preheating, the smoke detector went off again, much to my frustration. After opening windows, taking the battery out of the smoke detector, and being incredibly frustrated, I turned to investigate the oven. I still couldn't see anything inside the oven, so then I pulled out the drawer beneath the oven--and was quite surprised to see a red glow. Every oven I've ever used before has some sort of plate or something below the coils of the oven...but apparently not this one! My silicone pans were starting to burn, so, as I tried not to freak out, I turned off the oven and started pulling them out of the drawer. In the process, I managed to touch one of the pans to the coil and set my pan on fire! Luckily, it was small and the sink is two feet away, so things all worked out in the end...other than the fact that I scared myself nearly to death and have no desire to use my oven ever again.