fire and ice

As you know, if you're alive and have access to any kind of news (whether it be tv, internet, newspaper, office water cooler, whatever) there has been a rather larger winter storm in most of the Midwest the last few days.  Other people can tell you about it on their blogs.  As always, my blog focuses on me.

Well, Tuesday my car was encased in an ice shell, so I didn't even try to go to work.  But I dug it out and went to work on Wednesday.  However, I decided to make an easy morning of it.  I decided to actually have breakfast at home.  (Mom: I eat breakfast everyday, but usually it's an English muffin or some yogurt when I get to work.)  I didn't want to go all out with pancakes or french toast or anything like that.  But plain old cereal seemed a bit boring, especially when I was going to be stealing my roommate's milk anyway.  So I decided on oatmeal - it was still a hot breakfast, but it doesn't take much work. (And I could use the already-stolen-at-heart milk.)

And what goes better with oatmeal than some nice brown sugar?  After I'd put a few spoonfuls (well, really handfuls, as I was too lazy to get out another spoon) I thought, Oh dear, I just set this bag of brown sugar on the burner that was just being used to cook my oatmeal, I wonder what is going to happen next.  Most people would think it through a bit first, but I just picked up the bag and, as you imagine, sent brown sugar flying through the kitchen from the hole burned through the bottom of the bag.

Now Scarlet had two reasons to be mad at me - the milk, and the fact that she scoured the kitchen the day before.  Of course, I'm not quite the World's Worst Roommate, maybe just in the bottom ten, so I did clean it up instead of leaving it for her.  It turns out, according to the Internet, that pretty much the only way to get melted plastic off a burner is to allow it to cool and then scrape as much off as you can and burn off the rest.  It also turns out that plastic bags don't scrape off very well; they peal off okay, but not all the way, leaving melted plastic and sugar still plentifully attached.  The sugar doesn't dissolve well either.  But both burn off pretty well.  The sugar is an excellent fuel source and creates some nice little contained flames, and the smell of burning brown sugar nicely compliments the smell of burning plastic.  In case you wanted to know.

And that is the story of the fifth thing in my life that I've caught on fire on a burner, including a knife and a few oven mitts.  Fourth or fifth - I can't really remember how many oven mitts I've set on fire now.  Including the one that was supposed to be non-flammable.  But that might have been on purpose just to see.