Sometimes It Just Happens

Last night, our family invited another family over for dinner. At about 5:58, two minutes before said family was scheduled to arrive, Mom checked on the pizza in the oven and smoke started pouring out. Apparently some pizza that was not on a baking sheet had spilled between the rack and fallen on the bottom of the oven.

Now, you have to understand that our smoke detector is very close to our oven. So our very loud smoke detector will go off even if something is not burning. Here is the scene that ensued after finding that the pizza had started dripping onto the bottom of the oven.

Mom runs to grab some oven mits and take the pizzas out of the oven, while Dad and I frantically start throwing open windows and the sliding glass doors. Then Mom grabs a spatula and starts scraping burnt pizza from the bottom of the oven. Dad starts waving oven mits around the smoke detector to keep it from going off. Then, in an attempt to scrape all the pizza out of the oven, removes the oven racks while I continue to wave the oven mits around the smoke detector.

Of course, it just couldn't be that easy. There were also... ahem, *technical* difficulties putting the oven racks back into the oven. Yes. And pizzas still were not done baking. Lovely.

The scene continues.

Dad: "I wonder why these racks won't go back in?" CLING, CLASH, CLUMP! Titus: "OUCH! My finger is stuck!" I run over and find that Ti's finger is stuck under the closet door. I pull his finger out from under the door, attempting to be gentle. CLING, CLASH, CLUMP! CLING, CLASH, CLUMP!

With a happy ending for all, Dad figured out how to put the oven racks back into the oven, the pizza was put onto a baking sheet, and our guests still had not arrived. Yay!

The moral of the story: it never hurts to be just a couple minutes late for dinner at my house.