You know how sometimes you see something and it's been that way for a long time but suddenly, right then, you have to do something about it? That happened to me this morning. My daughter was standing on a stool, pressing buttons on the oven. The way this oven works, unless you press the On/Off button first, every other button you push just makes a "beep beep" sound. My daughter was loving that beep beep and she was occupied for a good while.
As I stood beside her, I noticed the spills that had crusted over in the oven through the door and I decided it was time to run the self-clean cycle. Or, rather, I considered it. The clean cycle on my old stove was four hours and although I'm sure it's suppose to be a safe thing to run at any time, I don't want to leave the house while it's in progress. When I pressed the self-clean button though, I was surprised to find out it was only an hour-and-a-half total clean time. So I pressed Start and took my daughter off to a different spot to play.
I told my husband about it when he got out of the shower and he agreed, had he known about the shorter duration, he would have cleaned it before now too. All went well for the first half of the cleaning, and then things started to smell like badly burnt food. And then, the all-house, fully-coordinated, painful synchronous, smoke detectors began to go off.
You may remember from a post long ago that when we changed the batteries in our smoke detectors, we discovered we had fifteen of these loud safety devices. Some of them are redundant because the security system has additional units. There are some a mere three feet from others because a four foot "hall" must have one even though there is one just across the threshold of the adjoining bedroom.
When fifteen of these little bleeders go off at a frequency that makes you uncomfortable and wanting to sprint away from the sound as quickly as possible, it's no fun for the entire family. We got the doors open and the terrified dog outside and the children were asking questions while daddy did the tried and true "door waving" procedure at the door closest to the kitchen. And the sirens stopped.
But don't celebrate yet, because the cleaning cycle was underway and nothing short of a full power outage was going to stop the scorching and burning process. So on and off the sirens went and the dog shivered and the children decided they wanted to go down the street and play. My husband said he really didn't want to stand there waving the door for another forty minutes.
I got my favorite, very old fan from the attic and we sucked air out through the garage at top fan speed with windows opened all around. We were successful in both keeping the sirens off as well as sucking all air-conditioned air from the house into the hot muggy outdoors. At this point, the klaxons ceased for good.
The clean cycle finished and yes, the oven is sparkly clean now. Next time, we won't wait so long to clean the oven. Also, remind me to do it in spring or fall when we don't have to lose so much heated or cooled air. Lesson learned.
The Big Boy Update: "It's your fault." My son was talking to Grandpa yesterday. He wasn't happy about how everything wasn't readily available to be shaped to his every whim. When he was frustrated enough, he told Grandpa, "It's your fault!"
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Spicy! She doesn't have a problem with spicy things. We got some delicious hot sausage at Costco yesterday and I heated some up this morning in the crock pot for later. When I sampled a piece, my daughter asked for a bit. I gave her some, expecting her either to spit it out or ask for water afterwards. She did neither; she asked for more. And she kept asking for more.
Someone Once Said: The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
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