Christmas Eve Fire

Oops.

So, my mother's birthday is in December and I told her that, for her birthday, I will do all of the cooking when I'm home for Christmas. It was going well until tonight.

I was making catfish for dinner. Apparently, the broiler on my parents' new oven is incredibly powerful. Not knowing this, I proceeded to make the fish the normal way...

There was some smoke coming out of the oven, and I just kept an eye on it. I opened the oven door to take the cooked fish out.

And it erupted into flames. I loudly announced: "It's on fire."

Well, we just closed the door and smothered the fire, no big deal. But my parents have one of those alarm systems that alerts the fire department to any problems. We turned it off, but it kept going off every few minutes anyhow.

So, we had a group of firefighters show up. They were quite nice, telling us that this sort of thing happens all of the time.

We gave them a tin of the sugared pecans my mom makes...

This follows the Great Greyhound Adventures of yesterday. I love the Greyhound. There's a different sense of humanity than on the plane, I think. People are kind. Well, our lovely trip lasted 12 hours because the bus we were supposed to transfer onto was overbooked. We spent quite a bit of time in the Erie bus station.