Flaming.

Today is the one week anniversary of our kitchen fire. I was going to blog about it earlier in the week, but didn't get around to it. My dingbat brother wanted to fry up some catfish for supper, (yes, we are Midwestern gay hillbillies who enjoy fryin' up a mess of catfish...) so he started a skillet with oil in it, and because he likes to obsessively check his Bear411 account every 10 minutes, he ran upstairs to his computer. I was quietly sitting in the living room, cozily reading a book (all right, it was an old Entertainment Weekly), with a cat on my lap, (Jasper) when I heard a disturbing whooshing noise from the kitchen, and looked up to see that delightful pattern of dancing flames silhoutted on the dining room wall. I ran to the kitchen, screamed at my brother that we were aflame and began looking for a lid to smother the fire. I finally found one, but I didn't get it completely covered so the flames were still shooting up, and the smoke kept billowing. And since the stove is adjacent to our refrigerator, which, like many refrigerators, is a personal kiosk of memorablilia and coming events, is covered with a thousand magnets, photos, recipes, posters and random scraps of paper, it seemed apparent that the fridge would soon ignite. By then, my brother, the firestarter. was on the scene and immediately grabbed some flour that was sitting on the counter, (to bread the catfish) and threw a handful on the fire to smother the flame. Naturally, the flour containing starch, had the opposite effect and the fire flamed higher. At this point, I ran outside to find the fire extinguisher that's kept next to the mailboxes in our apartment complex, grabbed it and raced back inside. Meanwhile, the fire had started to melt the flimsy lid that was half on the fiery pan and my brother had armed himself with multiple oven mitts, and had found a sturdier lid. While, I was desperately trying to figure out how to work the extinguisher, Chris had cleared the sink of enough dirty dishes to have room to put the skillet. He grabbed the pan, got it to the sink and tried to put on the new lid. It took a few tries, and fortunately we DON'T have curtains on the window over the sink, (but the soap bottle and the Windex bottle NEXT to the sink, did start to melt), and finally managed to get the lid on and the fire smothered. It seemed like this went on for many minutes, but in reality, it was probably about two minutes tops, but it was long enough to fill the house with nasty, black smoke. Once we got all the fans going and the majority of the smoke cleared out, we realized that the kitchen was rather thickly coated with a layer of smokey, grey, greasy residue. Our ceiling, normally a chalky off-white, was now a determined shade of grey. And since we are gay packrats, there's tons of kitchenware, serving ware and home decor type shit on top of the kitchen cabinets and it was all filthy. Every square inch of the kitchen had to be scrubbed to remove that schmutz; we're still not done, to be honest.

And to think, I used to think it hilarious whenever one of my dumb Sims would catch the kitchen on fire, which they inevitably did at least once a week. (Though, it STILL is hilarious to make them pee their pants...)