Happy Blogiversary!

Happy 1st Birthday, "My Happy Place". Yep...today marks the 1 year anniversary of my blog!! For those naysayers who figured it was a fleeting thing (like my previous feeble attempts), I say "ha! I did it!". For those people that have stuck around and read this boring drivel for the past 365 days, I thank you :). I hope I can continue to hold your interest with my 'witty' prose. Don't be so shy - comment!

To mark this momentous occasion, a story:

Lana met up with me at the house last night after I got off work. Chris was gone for the night - staying at Marco's, as he, Steve and Marco were planning a fishing trip early this morning. Lana had packed an over-night bag, and some wine, and we were having a 'girls night in'. I had picked up a few munchies, and she had brought some too, including a frozen pizza.

After about 15 minutes or so, I decided to check on the pizza, because I smelled burning. I wasn't overly concerned about the burning because we'd decided to cook the pizza right on the rack, so there was some dripping, which was burning off as it hit the element. Because it looked almost-done, I thought it was a good idea to take it off the rack and put it on a pizza pan, and then put the broiler on to heat up the top. I attempted to use a regular spatula to coax the pizza onto the pan. However, the pizza then broke in half. No problem, I figured - there were two of us, now I didn't have to cut it. Things got a little dicey, then, though, because the middle section started to ooze, and cheese and stuff started dripping rather ferociously. Lana came to my aid, advising we needed to pull the rack out more to make it easier. One half of the broken pizza was on the pan. The other half was pushed back toward the back of the oven.

Pulling the rack out was an ingenious idea (that Lana is so smart...did I mention she's the baker of the two of us? Did I mention that I'm the cleaner and Chris is the cooker between the two of us?). So, no problem, the now dissected pizza is now on the pizza pan, and Lana is now ready to push the rack back into position. I guess though, it had been pulled out just a teeeeny weeeeny bit too far - leading the rack off the 'track', and the motion of attempting to push it back into place was just what it needed to fall downward, dumping both pieces of pizza onto the red-hot element. Immediately, the flames and black smoke began. I squealed and opened a window...immediately rushing for my camera, because this would make a great "blog post", leaving poor Lana to try to grab the pieces of the defunct pizza before the entire oven went up in flames. The piercing scream of the smoke alarms were doing their best to wake the entire 'hood. Go figure, my battery was dead in the camera.

Luckily just taking the pizza off the element was enough to squelch the flames - but the smoke was pretty bad. So, we'd ruined our supper, the house was a stinky smoky mess, and COLD, because all the windows were open. We decided the only thing to do was make an emergency pit stop at Jack's Pizza, followed by the liquor store. The smell of about a dozen scented candles and a tall glass of Mudslide seemed to make it all better :)