Frozen Pizza Surprise

If I had a nickel for every time the fire department stopped by… shaking my head…

Especially since, according to Tighe and all the other recent Ukrainian-Russian geopolitical experts populating the world, the value of nickel is through the roof right now. My gosh, I’d be ridiculously wealthy.

I mean at this rate, they’re probably on the verge of calling Child Protective Services on us.

Are we that inept? 

And it probably didn’t help that Sam had boobytrapped our front entryway that morning with dining room chairs, toy bins and boxes, pillows, blankets and our blue, round ottoman. You know, to make a fort. On their fifth snow day in about eight weeks. 

But let me back up and explain the whole fire department thing. 

Something leaked in the oven, and I have no idea what it was. I didn’t even realize it had happened until one random Tuesday evening after returning from lacrosse practice when I darted inside, preheated the oven and then left again to drive the babysitter home. She only lives three blocks away, but it’s cold.

The kids were anticipating a frozen pizza, but when I stepped in from the cold again, smoke poured out of the kitchen.

It’s like our house is just destined to burn down.

“What is happening?” I said to no one in particular. 

Tighe was out of town, hence the babysitter, and it’s not like the kids noticed the smoke at all. 

I turned off the oven, turned on the vent fan above the stove, and left the back door open. 

Within a minute, the smoke detector started going off—remember the smoke detector? The very same one that DIDN’T go off when the candle exploded and the dining room caught fire a few blog posts ago?

Well, this time it went off. With a running jump, I reached up to silence it and used a tea towel to fan the smoky air out the back door. 

It worked well enough that the smoke detector didn’t go off again that evening. 

“Shoot,” I said to Lou, the only person who ever listens to me, “no frozen pizza tonight!”

“I want chicken nuggets and… cheput!” Which is what he calls ketchup.

I made grilled cheese instead. No one ate it because no one ever eats dinner during lacrosse season. Babysitter supervision means an afternoon smorgasbord of snacks.

“This is why you shouldn’t keep good snacks in the house,” Nate said, carrying his full plate of food to the sink.

Don’t get me wrong, Nate loves snacks as much as the next person, but he also loves a chance to be judgmental and condescending. 

Two more nights went by, complete with two more stovetop dinners—a stir-fry and spaghetti—and then we were faced with a snow day. 

Which means we were all home for an unprecedented amount of time. Since the last snow day, anyway. 

So I decided it was a good time to clean the oven.

I pulled some of those foaming oven-cleaner sprays from the cabinet under the sink, but a google search advised me not to use those stinky, toxic chemicals.  Just use the “self-clean” function on the oven. 

The four-hour setting. It’d be finished in time to make dinner. 

Set it and forget it, easy peazy. 

So that’s what I did. 

But google didn’t realize how dirty our oven was. 

And in less than five minutes, there was smoke coming from the top of the stove. Not a ton of smoke, but just a little.

“Hmm, that’s not good.”

I had hoped to do a workout while it cleaned itself, but I decided I should probably stay in the  kitchen and monitor the situation.

But first I had to go tell Tighe something. I don’t remember what, probably to share a meme or something. Or some gossip. Well, Tighe calls it gossip. I call it “meaningful and critical information for understanding why someone is the way they are.”

Anyway, I stood in the doorway of his office, telling him something either absolutely vital or hilariously funny when the loud shriek from the smoke detector cut me off. 

I jumped in the air, and Scooby Doo-ed my legs on the hardwood floors, scrambling to make it back to the kitchen to shut off the smoke detector. 

“Oh my gosh, it’s so much smoke!”

And it was! Like a dark, grainy fog clouding the entire kitchen.

Way more than there was a few nights ago.

I jumped to smack the button on the smoke detector, then slid across the wood floor to hit the “cancel” button on the oven.

Within seconds, the smoke detector was going off again, beeping loudly in that rhythmic yet irritating way. Alarming even.

I threw open the back door to the outside as Tighe reached up and turned off the smoke detector again. 

And so we raced back and forth, taking turns to swat the smoke detector and fan the flames out the door. 

“Ew, it smells like smoke in here,” Tess complained, mounting the steps from the basement.

Which was an understatement. I was coughing and the dogs were trying to escape out the door.

My phone lit up with an incoming call.

“Who would call at a time like this?” I said, gasping for air and trying to maneuver a small fan at just the right angle on the counter.

“Answer it!” Tighe was standing right next to me.

“Hello?”

“Ma’am, this is ADT, is everything okay?”

“Oh yeah, *nervous laughter* we just… the oven was smoking, but it’s off now and we’re just airing out the house now, trying to get all the smoke out of the kitchen.”

“Ma’am, what’s your password?”

“Uhhh… password? I don’t think we have a password?”

“Shoot! We have a password, I can’t remember what it is!”

Fortunately, the ADT guy was a professional. 

“Ma’am, is this your address? Are you at the home right now?”

“Yeah, I’m here, everything’s okay.”

“Ma’am, if you can’t provide the password, I’m going to have to call 911…”

He continued talking but whether it was his accent, a bad Verizon connection, or my own anxiety, I could not understand anything he said until…

“Good-bye, ma’am. Have a nice day.”

And he hung up. 

“I think the fire department’s coming,” I said to Tighe.

And sure enough, less than a minute later, I watched as a big red pumper truck, blue and red lights flashing, turned down our street and pulled up to our house.

“They’re here!” I announced. 

Tess didn’t budge from her seat on the couch—TV is an incredible babysitter—but Tighe scooped up Lou and carried him outside to meet the firefighters. 

They let him check out their oxygen tanks and sit in the front seat for a brief minute, all of which Lou’s actually done before. No big deal, our kids aren’t impressed with emergency professionals any more. 

“You sure everything’s okay?” one of them called before they drove off.

“Yep! Thank you so much! We really appreciate you coming out!” Tighe called out to our heroes, bringing Lou back into the house.

“See you next week, I guess,” I muttered to myself, waving and pulling the front door closed. 

About an hour later—I let the oven cool completely while I searched Nebraska Furniture Mart’s website for in-stock gas ranges—I pulled the cap off the oven cleaner spray and started scrubbing off the mysterious spill. All is well now. We have a functioning, non-smoking oven again. Frozen pizzas for everyone.