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Monday, July 16, 2012

Plastic, Water, Metal, Fire and I






My mind raced at 100 mph to figure out a way to douse the flames that were quickly spreading. Without further hesitation, I grabbed a cup from the cupboard, filled it with water and dumped it on the flames that were burning brightly on top of the kitchen stove. It took me 3 or 4 times of filling the cup, dumping it on the flames, refilling it and pouring it on the flames once again before i had totally doused the flames. Life can be a roller-coaster ride here in Buenos Aires and it can often start with the simplest mundane everyday thing you can think of. The simple task of making scrambled eggs wound up with me scrambling for a cup of water to douse out flames on the stove top in the kitchen.


First you have to understand that people cook on gas stoves, the kind with the long metal bars and burners where you have to turn on the gas and light a flame. On my very first trip to BA, I had no idea how these things worked. When I first cooked eggs, I would turn off the gas and stick the pan with eggs on top of it and sit there with a huge question mark on top of my head wondering why the eggs weren't going from clear to white. Someone had to explain it to me that I have to light  a match to get the burner going. This being my third trip to BA, if I didn't know this by now then I deserve to have a dunce cap stuck on top of my head and be made to sit in the corner.

Everything was going all as planned and when I noticed that there was some kind of black drippings on the stove top that had caught on fire. At first I thought that maybe it was the liquid from the scrambled eggs had split over and were burning up. So I thought nothing of it and continued to cook for a few seconds more thinking that the flame would burn out. It didn't, in fact it started to spread. And there seemed to be more of that same black melted stuff on the bars of the stove.

Alot of you out there may know of a popular video game called "The Sims". It is a computer a game where you create people and design their looks, personalities etc. And you can put them in a house with furniture where they live and breathe. You have the ability to sit back and relax and watch them live their lives. Or you can take control of their actions and make them eat, sleep, or interact with another person. In short, in you get to have a day in the life of Gods shoes.

The unluckiest sims were ones that happened to be born into a world where I held the title as creator of the universe. I would have all kinds of fun with these beings I created by doing things like building a house and not putting  a toilet in it and them watching them have "accidents" and then cry and stomp their feet.

But sometimes they didn't need any of my help to end up doing stupidly hilarious. These people had skill levels like cooking etc. Different sims had different types of skills and skill levels. If a sim with a high cooking skill used the kitchen , they would end up with a lovely nourishing dinner. But if a sim had low cooking skills and tried to use the kitchen, it would be a likely probability that you would see the stove all of a sudden burst into flames and the sim having a nervous breakdown dancing around the kitchen screaming in gibberish at the sight of flames.

That scenario pretty much sums up the real life scene that was happening in the kitchen although I have to admit that I was much more composed than those sim characters in my reaction to the situation. I did not scream in gibberish and kept my dancing around the kitchen in a panic to a minimum.

With little hesitation, I shoved the pan of eggs aside that I had been cooking, got a cup full of water and doused out the flame. It was only after the flames had died completely that I could actually see what happened. Remember how I mentioned that the there were long black bars on top of these old gas stoves. There as actually something else on the stove that day, it was a grey/black coat hanger that had been set down on the burner beside the one I was using.

It doesn't take a brain scientist to know that fire, metal and plastic were never schoolmates and don't get along well on the playground together.  And when these three do decide to play together, it's usually with disastrous results. Luckily the only really casualty of this whole episode is that the top part of a cheap, broken, coat hanger got melted. I was able to clean up the kitchen and have it as good as new. The last thing I want is for my housemates to all of a sudden find bits of plastic in the food the same color as the coat hanger.


And that my friend is the story of how an attempt to make scrambled eggs ended up with me scrambling to put a fire out  :P











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Amorous Alpacas

Amorous Alpacas