Smoked Dinner

Do you ever write a word and stare at it, contemplating how it looks? "Smoked" is messing with my mind.

Anyhow, today was my mother-in-law's birthday. I spent a good chunk of time preparing for her to come over. Her gift was wrapped, the cake was made, dinner was cooking and the table was set. Then the smoke alarm went off. At first I panicked about the biscuits in the oven burning. When I checked the biscuits were fine, but one had slid to the end of the cookie sheet and, not being fully cooked yet, was dripping onto the bottom of the oven. It took about a minute for the house to fill with smoke. Our smoke alarms are the fancy-shmancy kind that are all connected so they were all going off at once. I turned off the oven and my husband was frantically fanning the smoke alarm, but to no avail. The noise continued. We turned on all the fans in the house, turned off the heat, and opened the door. (Side note - I was worried that the sound of the smoke alarm with the door open would bring neighbors running, but in our keep-to-ourselves woods not a soul came to check out the loud, annoying noise. Good to feel safe in case of actual emergency...) Eventually the alarms stopped. The house was suddenly quiet, cold, smelly, and full of smoke. And my mother-in-law was due to arrive in 15 minutes. For her birthday. I lit some incense (yeah, that'll hide the smell) and set a pot of water boiling to re-humidify the air. I added some spices to the water which, believe it or not, really helped! Overall, not my best evening.

A few things turned out okay. My mother-in-law was running late and the smoke was gone by the time she arrived. Dinner turned out fine and didn't even taste like smoke. We had great conversation and everyone enjoyed the cake.

I think my cats are still hiding.