Burning down the house (attempt 1)

Today I came back to work after being home sick for two days. I was not feeling better but I was bored and if I don’t have a doctor’s note, I can’t stay out more than two days in a row anyway. I don’t have a doctor, hence the reason I’m in today. Tonight after work, or in the morning, I’m going to go to the hospital if I don’t feel better, though, because now I have a fever and the cold is in my chest and honestly, I feel like I did when I caught man flu/pneumonia in Bosnia that time.

I’ll be damned, though, if I get sent back to the German hospital for 8 days. My sanity cannot handle that right now. So, we’ll go a bit earlier than when I start to hallucinate and hope I can just get some medicine and walk on out. I cannot be sick next week and I also cannot be subjected to a shared room in the TB ward again. Dear God no.

Now. While I sort that out, let’s go over what destruction I caused this week. I like to call this episode, Further Proof Heather Doesn’t Belong in the Kitchen or, as Mr. H would probably title it, Reasons Heather is a Horrible Wife, part 9 trillion.

So I was trying to be somewhat productive and domestic on the first day I was sick by tossing together a roast and vegetables in the crock pot so it could cook while I was asleep. I figured that’d be nice of me and it’d be ready by the time the Mr. got home and I could sleep while it cooked. So I cooked it in this.

This crock pot might look harmless but it's not.

Now the only reason I’m using this old thing is because I think my mom gave it to me when I was in college and so I’ve kept it around, even though I have a newer one at my sister’s house that I got for one of my weddings. So anyway. I plug it in, dinner is cooking and I go back to the couch for a few hours of sick sleep. I did notice a bit of a burning smell after the first half hour, but since the crockpot is from the U.S., it was plugged into the adapter, which always makes a funny smell (kind of) if a heavy-duty American appliance is plugged into it.

Half an hour more into the cooking, I heard a banging noise and got up to see that both handles had fallen right off the crock pot. I didn’t happen to notice that they actually melted clear off the pot. I also didn’t notice that the adapter was turned on low and the pot was turned on high. Apparently this is not a good thing.

Really, I just figured the smell was an indication of electricity, hard at work. Makes sense to me.

About an hour later, I started to clean up the mess and moved the plastic chopping board out from under the crock pot, where a piece of it had been stuck, and even though I noticed that it was melted almost to nothing, I just put it in the dishwasher and wiped off the counter. Never occurred to me that I was in the process of potentially burning down my house.

That night, almost 9 hours after I started the roast, I served said dinner and after it was cleared, I went upstairs to look for my new computer programs to download on the Airbook. This is about the time I heard an outrageous amount of swearing and yelling coming from the kitchen. Normally Mr. H doesn’t reduce himself to dramatics for no reason and so I ran down to see what the fit was about. And then I saw this, and I knew two things.

This is what being a moron looks like.

1. I was in a lot of trouble.
2. I should have my IQ or my mental retardation status checked.
3. I am really terrible at both common sense and all things domestic.
So ok, that’s 3-4 things that picture tells me, but to be honest, this whole situation tells you so many more things about me and my special behavior.

This is the point of the story where as I moved closer to the burn, I started hoping it’d scratch off or I could blame someone else or I could squint really hard and I’d disappear and pop up in a chocolate store in France or somewhere a bit happier than my kitchen. Instead of that happening, though, I just saw an uglier view of the burn.

Yes, it's cracked and peeled and awful looking.

Then I started crying irrationally about turning more Germans against us and how now all of our friends that visit will think the house is ugly and why we’re terrible people who don’t deserve nice things because we are ruiners. Unfortunately, I don’t keep pictures around of me sobbing so you’ll have to just picture this.

Flash to yesterday, day two of being sick at home…

I had to avoid the kitchen as much as possible. I couldn’t stand to even go in there a few minutes to get tea or more medicine or food because the burn was just staring right back at me, as if to say, you’re a fucking idiot and here’s an easy reminder of that and it was making my head hurt more than breathing in 9 hours of burning plastic made it hurt and so on sick day two I went down to the store and came up with a solution.

Decorating success

Pretty plant, don’t you think?

Problem solved. For now.