So everyone can take pleasure in my pain.

Everyone knows I'm not the greatest cook. If I follow directions EXACTLY things tend to be ok. It's when I get creative that things go terribly wrong. Like tonight.

Yes, it is Christmas Eve - at 11:30 pm actually when I'm writing this. I offered to make a breakfast casserole for the family for Christmas morning. But I wanted to make it the night before because I'm definitely not a morning person. The casserole I decided to make has a ton of ingredients including bacon. I hate cooking bacon, so I decided to throw it in the oven on an aluminum pan to cook instead. While it was in there I was busy grating the cheese, chopping the onions, etc. I was very careful to diligently check on the bacon so it wouldn't burn but it didn't seem to be cooking. So I turned up the cooking temp to somewhere over 400 degrees. I then kept assembling the rest of it and remember thinking how well it was going, and how I might actually have an uneventful cooking experience. And that was the moment the fire alarm went off.

I kind of panicked when it happened because the alarm was SO loud, and it was 10:30 at night. I didn't want to wake my neighbors and cause a bigger scene. So I started running to my patio door and then stopped when I saw how much smoke was coming out of the oven so I ran back to the oven to grab the bacon. That's when I remembered that I only have one hot pad and all my towels were in the wash. I took the one hot pad and attempted to take the pan out of the oven. Because the pan was just aluminum foil, it kind of crumpled around my hand, spilling bacon grease all over the oven, all over the floor, and covering my thumb in the bubbling mess. I ran with the collapsing pan to the patio door where I remembered that the patio door isn't only locked, but it's blocked by a security device thing because I'm paranoid at night. I had to free the security bar while my thumb became one with the boiling grease that kept threatening to redecorate my living room floor. Miraculously I got the pan out on the patio before the pan could completely collapse.

I then ran and got a shirt and furiously tried to wave the smoke out the door to stop the alarm. After a couple minutes the alarm finally quieted and I realized how stinking bad my thumb hurt. I actually had bought a first aid kit over a year ago that I had never used. I brought it out and tried to find some kind of burn cream. I had to through every item in the kit including an emergency blanket, a glow stick, and anti-diarrheal pills before I FINALLY found some burn cream. By the way, have you ever noticed that it takes two working thumbs to open a bandaid?

So tonight I learned not to cook bacon in the oven, that people that make first aid kits apparently people think most customers are diarrhea-ridden, cold, and in the dark, and that I really need two hot pads.

Merry Christmas.