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wombat1138This weekend was overly exciting in a burny sort of way.
Saturday evening: I wake up from a nap and stumble to the kitchen, where I notice that there's a smoky smell coming from the large covered pot which the wombat-consort usually boils water in for pasta. Meanwhile, he's gone back downstairs to resume his usual computer game. This is not terribly unusual; most of the time, once it starts to make boiling noises, I call him back upstairs, and often when the pot first gets reheated after being washed, there's a thin film of grease on the bottom that gets burned off. I turn down the electric burner from full heat to the medium-high range and poke at translations/beadage for a while.
After a half-hour or so, the wombat-consort still hasn't returned upstairs. I go back to the kitchen for a beverage and notice that the smoky smell has gotten worse, there are harsh snaky sputterings coming from the bottom of the pot and sparky flakes are falling off it into the burner coil. I pick up the pot (with potholders) to take a look and realize that a.) the pot feels suspiciously light and b.) the bottom is now extremely shiny and slightly concave.
Did I mention that this pot had a nonstick coating?
I probably got a minor blast of Teflon fumes when I opened the lid to take a look at the crumpled interior-- within another half-hour or so, my vision started to blur out and wooziness set in, but that might've just been in the natural way of sleepiness anyway-- but didn't notice any lingering aftereffects when I woke up this morning. As it turned out, the wombat-consort had apparently put the pot of water onto the full-blast burner at least a half-hour before I got up and possibly an hour or longer, and then forgotten all about it while it completely boiled away and sublimated about half of the Teflon coating up onto the pot lid.
Luckily, the cats were already shut away for the night-- there are some reports of cats dying from Teflon fumes, though birds seem to be the usual victims-- and the fishtank on the other side of the fridge seemed okay, so possibly the pot lid and the hood fan caught most of the vapor. But still, gah.
This afternoon: after throwing out the old pot and going to buy a new one after lunch, we take a walk along the bay. Nice sunny day, lots of people out with bicycles and/or urchins. Don't actually know how long we were out there, but within a couple hours of returning home, it became (as they say) painfully obvious that we'd both managed to get rather nasty cases of sunburn, each in our own particular idiom-- I was wearing a hat and a sleeveless spaghetti-strap top, so my face is fine but I'm toasted all the way across the shoulders, starting from mid-bicep/upper-bosom level; he had short sleeves but no hat, so I think he got it across the neck and face.
Ow ow ow ow. Ow. Ow.
The new pot (not nonstick) works fine, though.
Saturday evening: I wake up from a nap and stumble to the kitchen, where I notice that there's a smoky smell coming from the large covered pot which the wombat-consort usually boils water in for pasta. Meanwhile, he's gone back downstairs to resume his usual computer game. This is not terribly unusual; most of the time, once it starts to make boiling noises, I call him back upstairs, and often when the pot first gets reheated after being washed, there's a thin film of grease on the bottom that gets burned off. I turn down the electric burner from full heat to the medium-high range and poke at translations/beadage for a while.
After a half-hour or so, the wombat-consort still hasn't returned upstairs. I go back to the kitchen for a beverage and notice that the smoky smell has gotten worse, there are harsh snaky sputterings coming from the bottom of the pot and sparky flakes are falling off it into the burner coil. I pick up the pot (with potholders) to take a look and realize that a.) the pot feels suspiciously light and b.) the bottom is now extremely shiny and slightly concave.
Did I mention that this pot had a nonstick coating?
I probably got a minor blast of Teflon fumes when I opened the lid to take a look at the crumpled interior-- within another half-hour or so, my vision started to blur out and wooziness set in, but that might've just been in the natural way of sleepiness anyway-- but didn't notice any lingering aftereffects when I woke up this morning. As it turned out, the wombat-consort had apparently put the pot of water onto the full-blast burner at least a half-hour before I got up and possibly an hour or longer, and then forgotten all about it while it completely boiled away and sublimated about half of the Teflon coating up onto the pot lid.
Luckily, the cats were already shut away for the night-- there are some reports of cats dying from Teflon fumes, though birds seem to be the usual victims-- and the fishtank on the other side of the fridge seemed okay, so possibly the pot lid and the hood fan caught most of the vapor. But still, gah.
This afternoon: after throwing out the old pot and going to buy a new one after lunch, we take a walk along the bay. Nice sunny day, lots of people out with bicycles and/or urchins. Don't actually know how long we were out there, but within a couple hours of returning home, it became (as they say) painfully obvious that we'd both managed to get rather nasty cases of sunburn, each in our own particular idiom-- I was wearing a hat and a sleeveless spaghetti-strap top, so my face is fine but I'm toasted all the way across the shoulders, starting from mid-bicep/upper-bosom level; he had short sleeves but no hat, so I think he got it across the neck and face.
Ow ow ow ow. Ow. Ow.
The new pot (not nonstick) works fine, though.
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no subject
on 2006-05-15 01:43 pm (UTC)I need to come out to that coast sometime!
no subject
on 2006-05-15 10:02 pm (UTC)Actually, my total sleep hours are much closer to normal these days, but they're still scattered all over the place. Highly annoying. Oh well, finally lined up some new doc appts for the next few weeks, so we'll see how that goes....
no subject
on 2006-05-15 06:31 pm (UTC)And, in fact, ow.
I thought I'd burned a glass saucepan (y'know, that Visions stuff) beyond recovery once; I swear to you, the garnet glass actually went amber until it cooled down. But it seemed to've survived after all.
Had a couple of incidents with stuff reallyreally burned onto the bottom of pans recently, too, which made me discover that boiling straight Clorox does Interesting Things to organic substances [/madscientist].
no subject
on 2006-05-17 07:18 pm (UTC)