Fire in the Hole!

It all started with one little question from Grandma Looney: “Have you ever used your self-cleaning oven? ”

This developed into an entire story typical of Grandma Looney revolving around 2 themes – (1) her house is a mess and (2) her roundabout way of thinking.

Why would she need to clean the oven, all of a sudden (obviously never having done it before)?

“I was heating up some garlic bread…”

Ohhhh… and it must have burned.

“No.  The chex mix did. Well, and the plastic bowl.”

Wait. I thought it was garlic bread.

This is when Grandma Looney starts rolling her eyes, amazed that I can’t follow along. But why was she cooking bread and chex mix in a plastic bowl in the oven? Did she not know you can’t use plastic in the oven?

“Well, of course I didn’t do that!”

Here’s what happened. Grandma Looney put Chex Mix in a plastic bowl. Then, she cooked some garlic bread. She did not eat all of either one. At some point, Grandma Looney needed the counter space her garlic bread and Chex Mix were taking up (here’s theme number 1… her counters look like a scene from Hoarders), so she stored them in the oven (theme number 2 – this is the last place anyone else in our family would store food. How about the refrigerator?). Later, she thought she would heat up the garlic bread but forgot about the Chex Mix. She turned on the oven and BOOM! Fire.

But we never would have found that out if she didn’t ask that one simple question that kept up asking WHY she needed to clean her oven so badly… Have you ever used your self-cleaning oven?

Good news, though. The smoke detector alerted her before the fire spread… Luckily, the week prior, Grandma Looney had just called the city fire department – 3 firemen and a full fire engine – to her house to change the batteries on her smoke detector.