Daily Archives: July 21, 2008

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Do you ever wonder how multi-published authors can crank out over a dozen books a year?

Concentration. Even as storytellers they lose themselves in their plots and away they go. Sounds simple, right? Well it is in a sense. You sit, you write, you repeat. And there you have the “magic formula” for every single fantastic book you’ve ever read.

But they never tell you about the hazards.

Last week I was sitting at my laptop happily typing away. My chair was right near the sliding glass door of my balcony and it was noisy enough, and windy enough for me not to notice little things.

Until I was interrrupted by a startling sound.

It was, as you might imagine, an effective distraction. And for once I didn’t mourn the loss of focus. I was too busy staring as smoke curled out of the top vents of the microwave. (Did you know that’s what those vents were for? I had no idea!)

I ended up with something that looked a little bit like this:

I’m going to have to apologize here and admit that it’s not actually my picture. I found it HERE. I was too distracted to think to grab my camera. LOL.

But here is what I’ve learned:
1) You know you eat a lot of microwaveable meals when you instinctively just hit the button for 6 minutes.
2) Microwave popcorn does not take six minutes to pop.
3) If you happen to set off your fire alarm it is best to air out the entire house as quickly as possible so the whole place doesn’t smell. But…
4) Chances are it’s going to smell REALLY bad for awhile anyway.
5) The only way to make the smell of charcoaled microwave popcorn go away is to wipe every surface (especially the inside of the microwave) with bleach wipes, followed by spraying fantastic, followed by spraying windex.

Eventually you’ll realize none of those really work and you’ll just start laying out large platters of baking soda EVERYWHERE including inside the microwave.

And after a week, the smell of burnt popcorn will go away, along with the after-smell of stale cigarettes.

See, it’s Monday morning and you’ve already learned something!

Dana
The Popcorn Incinerator

(P.S. See mom, this is why I don’t cook!)