So I was getting out of the shower last night around 10 PM, and as I was drying off (I won’t tell you what part of me), I heard what sounded like a series of homemade explosive devices going off in my kitchen. One might compare it to the sound a cymbal makes when being struck by a thousand pieces of shrapnel. Amidst the microcosmic war taking place in my kitchen, I heard the screams of my beloved wife, followed by obscene cursing that could only be voiced by a sailor in the shower the next morning after pulling into port, and that’s putting it lightly.
I dried off what remained of my freshly cleansed body (I still won’t tell you what part) and went running into the kitchen to see my wife leaning against the dishwasher, holding her foot over a fresh puddle of blood. Glass and Blueberry Cobbler were everywhere, covering the top of the oven, running down the door onto the floor below. It was a baking nightmare.
The oven will forever be reverently referred to as “Ground Zero”. Debris was scattered everywhere within a 15 foot radius. The kitchen floor, kitchen counters, dining room furniture, the living room, Monte’s crate---it seemed that no point in my shoebox apartment was untouched by the tragedy.
My immediate response was anger and hostility (the event elicited the same emotions as a terrorist attack might---as you can see I am drawing several parallels). It had been a long day, and I was tired, worn-out, exhausted, yada-yada. I was ready for some R&R, and the whimpering of my poor, wounded wife compelled me to clean the kitchen as her dutiful husband. But I ordered an explanation for what happened, trying my best to give her the benefit of a doubt while satisfying my indignation over her apparent clumsiness.
So, what happened was this: she was cooking the blueberries for her cobbler in a pot to soften them for filling the cobbler. When they had finished stewing, she moved the pot to another eye while she waited for butter in the casserole dish to melt in the oven and coat the dish, as called for by the recipe. She had turned the eye off, and within a short interval removed the casserole dish from the oven and placed it on the stove to add the additional ingredients for baking.
The eye upon which she placed the dish was still extremely hot, a factor she had both forgotten and was unaware the implications of. Within a few seconds of being placed on the hot eye, the dish literally exploded, followed by a LOUD blast, sending small shards of glass across the apartment and even into Rachel’s uncovered legs where cuts can be visibly seen (that’ll teach her to cook in her underwear). It was all over but the shouting, as they say.
Rachel being out of commission with a badly bleeding toe, I cleaned up the kitchen, and what an ordeal that was. It took me two hours, the most frustrating two hours of cleaning I’ve ever endured. The eye still being hot cooked the scattered ingredients to the stove, and what a scrub job that was to get off.
Small fragments of glass were literally everywhere, and probably still are. I couldn’t move anywhere in the kitchen without feeling pin-pricks in the bottom of my feet. By the end of the clean-up, it was hard to tell the blood from the blueberry juice. We’ll probably be stepping in glass for months to come. The dog kept running into the kitchen to lick from the floor any scrap of food he could find, as he always does, and that was an unwelcome distraction.
So, explaining the title, I blame glass, not my wife for what happened. Glass. I mean, who knew. I’m sure the last fool who made the same mistake. The moral of the story is don’t put glass cookware on a hot eye, simple as that. I can’t explain the physics, but just don’t do it. Consider yourself sufficiently warned by the guy with cuts between his fingers and a gimpy wife.
Pictured above: The before and after photos.
