Those who follow me on Twitter may have already seen this photo, but I wanted to share the story behind it.
Towards the end of yesterday, another in a long-line of terribly busy Fridays, I was looking forward to heading home for a relaxing evening of nothing. After all, we’ve only really been in our new apartment about a week and a half, and haven’t really been able to relax since the move.
On my way home, I swung by Jergen’s in Oakland to pick up the top tier of our wedding cake, which had lived in his freezer while we moved. Lugging a box full of ice-packs and a frozen rock pretending to be a cake is rather tiresome, making my exit from the BART station all the more satisfying, the home stretch!
Walking down the street I see a policeman sitting in his car, idling in the cross walk. “Assclown” I think to myself, the police can never just park in a proper spot, they always have to be somewhere they shouldn’t.
Brushing that off I continue walking and I notice red flashing lights a couple blocks down, the progression of my thoughts are: “maybe there was a car accident” and I walk a bit further. “I wonder if something caught fire” and I walk a bit further, now estimating that the distance to the fire trucks is roughly the distance I have to walk to get home. Then the worry sets in.
I walk up the steps to the apartment as the trucks pull away, to an open apartment door with yellow boot prints going in and out of the building. Erin starts crying as I ask:
What the hell happened?
Apparently, Erin gets home, changes out of her work clothes and texts me to determine how long until I get home. Planning for my arrival, she turns on the oven for the first time in our new apartment to cook a pizza to start our relaxing night of watching shows and nothing else.
The oven starts smoking, she opens it and it’s on fucking fire. She turns off the oven and grabs the fire extinguisher, sprays the fire putting it out. Walking upstrairs she knocks on our landlord’s door, after no immediate answer she walks downstairs again and the oven is on fucking fire again.
The landlord’s wife called the fire department, and neither Erin nor the landlord could figure out why the fire refuses to go out, something inside the oven was on fucking fire.
When the fire department arrives, judging from the aftermath in our apartment, I can only assume they detonated a bomb with a few kilograms of yellow powder in our apartment.
Yellow dust is everywhere.
The cat is scared silly and slept most of the night hiding in the closet.
The smoke detector works.