Blog Schmog

I feel the desire to blog, yet have nothing interesting to say. I do have a story, but it's not interesting. Kind of funny, but that's about all I can provide you with for now. Here goes.

When we first moved into our apartment it there were no smoke detectors anywhere. The people who lived here before us took them when they left. They also took the light fixtures in the two bedrooms. Seriously. After a month or two of (illegally) having no smoke detectors we called the management and told them that we needed some. The next night we came home and we had two smoke detectors up and running. One was placed in the hall next to our bedroom and the vanity area. The other was placed in the kitchen. When I thought about having a smoke detector in the kitchen I thought that was kind of a weird idea. Couldn't it easily go off just by being in the kitchen? Rick assured me that it was fine where it was because what if you put the smoke detector somewhere else and then you were baking something that you forgot about and it was burning and you had to wait until the smoke reached the other smoke detector to know about it? I thought that was a long shot excuse, but whatever, it could happen. Well guess what? He was wrong. Yeah, that's right, Rick isn't always right. Neither is the guy who installed the freaking thing.

I've almost quit cooking because of how often I set off the smoke detector. EVERY time I cook bacon it goes off. Baking cookies makes it go off. Making toast makes it go off. The thing I didn't understand was why would the smoke detector go off if I didn't burn any of the things I was making? I make some pretty amazing oatmeal butterscotch cookies, but the smoke detector had me questioning my every move in the kitchen. You know how the batteries in smoke detectors last for years because the smoke detector never goes off? We have had ours for a matter of a few months and the last time it went off it made that awful battery-dying noise. My cooking made a smoke alarm battery die. Needless to say, my confidence was shaken.

Tonight I set the smoke detector off by making no-bake peanut butter bars. Yeah, you read that right, NO-BAKE. How did I set it off? By boiling a pan of water that I had to put the package of the chocolate in that goes on top of the bars. Yeah, I boiled water and it went off. There was a tiny piece of food stuck under the burner causing a tiny amount of smoke but somehow the overly sensitive smoke detector caught it. The moral of this story is this - husbands aren't always right, my cooking is good, and smoke detectors don't belong in the kitchen.

A side note about the smoke detector - the reset button doesn't work. I struggled (and went mostly deaf) trying to turn the stupid thing off. I finally had to unplug the battery every time it went off. I don't know how to put videos on here but click here to find a similar (but way funnier) struggle with a smoke detector.