Defrosting Muffins: The Risk They Never Told You About

 After about two weeks here together (Me and Andrew and Andrew), the typical issues have come up over kitchen cleanliness and not playing our guitar while Elizabeth naps. We get along nicely and I have not only one but two people to project my need for nagging onto. Game nights are an absolute blast and usually have me in tears because someone stole my only sheep- who I proudly named Keith and was planning to use to build a settlement. Or just keep on as a full-time pet. I also won 4/4 games of UNO the other night and by the last game, the duo attempted to team up against me in order to prevent another victory. I feel like the boys never care who wins a game, as long as it isn’t me. Rude. 

 Quarantine has been better than I expected so far but there are times where I’m alone with my sleeve of Oreos wondering if this will be my reality until the end of my life.

 I’d like to add that SOMEONE, I won’t specify who (but his name rhymes with “Mandrew”) insisted on buying REGULAR Oreos at Costco. 10 sleeve at 13 cookies a sleeve, and not a single one of them is double stuffed. I am forced to disassemble and rearrange each Oreo I want and sometimes I throw the extra cookie away out of pure spite.

 Fortunately, this same person who has bad tastes in cookies has good taste in music and we’ve been on a nice John Mayer kick this week. It’s a good sort of somber, cry over your cereal vibe but also calming during a time where we could be overly anxious. That is when he isn’t blasting Justin Bieber in the shower for forty minutes. This is my life now.  

I have a cute male friend who is quarantined in his hometown in the U.P. about six hours away who I facetime a few times a day to check in on. Gotta make sure he’s still violently high. He won’t be returning to me and the city until this clears over because of severe asthma and almost certain death if he catches COVID-19 which hacking up people’s lungs left and right here. We can just call him Josh. Don’t get excited, it isn’t serious. What is serious is the lack of a microwave in this apartment. We had one. It moved in with one of the boys and was very high powered and no buttons just a dial. It was intimidating but I won’t say it had it coming.

*Try to read the rest of this story in the voice of a British man who would be narrating for 20/20 or Dateline.*

On our second day here, I was trying to defrost a muffin in this microwave on one of the paper plates we were using until our glass dishes arrived. I no longer had the box with the instructions to heat up this muffin but I remembered something along the lines of four minutes. About a minute into this particular reheat, I had walked away because a watched pot never cooks or something I don’t know. It all happened rather quickly after that. Drew was shouting my name from the kitchen because both muffin and paper plate were engulfed in flames. I came running. He opened the microwave and smoke came pouring out. The fire ceased and I grabbed the smoking plate holding the very smokey muffin and ran it out to the back deck to get some of the smoke out of the house. I went to open windows and remember coughing as my throat burned from the amount of smoke in the kitchen. At that point, no form of smoke detector had triggered and I noted that we were not safe to stay here. Eventually, it did go off, and it’s one of those fun ones where the nice lady’s voice goes “Fire, Fire” as if you didn’t know why the beeping was happening in the first place or what element causes smoke. 

The kitchen smelled awful for days, even after washing all of the smoke-stained glasses from the cabinet above where the microwave was sitting. It was the microwave itself that was holding this intense smell that needed to be explained to every person who walked into the kitchen. A decision was made, not executively, to carry old Mike out to the dumpster and eliminate that smell once and for all. He has yet to be replaced. I reheat my food over the stovetop as they did in the 1800s. Any time I dare to mention how much I would like to have a microwave here, I am reminded how I lit a muffin on fire and DESTROYED the one we had. The moral of the story is that you should keep the reheat instructions so you can prove that it did, in fact, tell you to set the microwave to four minutes to reheat. 

*As this is being written I’m sitting in the kitchen where they boys are making dinner. The fire alarm has already gone off once. This is the eleventh time since we moved in, only the first being caused by myself.