Yet Another Fire in the Peevie Homestead

I was feeling miserable with the head cold from hell, and had considerately taken myself to bed. I gave C. Peevie instructions on finishing up dinner: wash, pierce, butter, and wrap the potatoes in foil and put in oven. Remove foil-wrapped rib packs from oven, carefully dump into roasting pan, cover with BBQ sauce, and return to oven. Simple enough, right?

All was well--except for, you know, the fever, congestion like a brick behind my nose and eyes, and prodigious amounts of snot emigrating from my nasal passages--until C. Peevie's friend Lil' Biscuit walked into my room and said, "Um, C. Peevie wanted me to let you know that the oven is on fire."

Most normal parents, I assume, would immediately leap out of bed and race to the scene of the conflagration. Not me. I have a high tolerance for domestic contretemps. I laid there, pondering whether or not this was God's way of putting me out of my mucus-filled misery, and then I asked, "Are there actual flames, or are you exaggerating?"

"Well," said Lil' Biscuit, "There were flames, but I think C. Peevie put them out. And then I kind of thought I was going to die from smoke inhalation."

"Crap," I thought as I pulled my plague-infested self out of bed. "I better check it out."

Sure enough, the entire first floor was filled with smoke. I felt my way to the kitchen and found C. Peevie waving away the smoke that still billowed from the oven.

"I turned the oven off," he announced. "I think the rib juices caught fire. I threw a cup of water on them."

"You threw water on a grease fire?" I asked, extremely unsupportively.

"It's not grease," he said, "It's just meat juice."

"And what's 'meat juice' made of?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Oops. I was remembering what you did when we had that fire in the bathroom."

Well, it all worked out without the help of the Chicago Fire Department or a trip to the emergency room. Which in my world means it barely even counts as an incident.