No one was harmed except a dozen eggs.

Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned that someone on another blog said they thought homesteading blogs were boring?  Well, one thing that bears mentioning is that when things do happen around the homestead, they are anything but boring -- at least to the person they are happening to. And some drama could just as easily take place in an urban apartment as on a farm.  Like this morning, for example.

This morning I decided to make Big Ag and Groceries some hard-boiled eggs to take to work with them, since they both mentioned they like them and we have plenty of eggs.  It was a bright, cool, spring morning -- perfect for setting out the lettuce and spinach transplants that were ready to go in the ground, and so I decided to do both at the same time. 

Ya, right. Multitasking is not my cup of tea, and I've certainly proved that once again -- in spades. You'd think that by 53 years of age I'd have figured this out, but apparently not.

So anyway, once I got outside, spring beckoned me down into the pasture, and so I spent some time down there weeding and cutting some grass with a manual hedge-clipper.  Most enjoyable work on a nice day.  Off in the distance I could hear a smoke alarm going off, but we have a neighbor whose alarm will regularly go off if they as much as burn toast, so I thought no more about it.

Nor did I think about it when I passed by our back door and smelled burning....it is spring, after all, which is burn season around here, and so I figured someone was just burning some kind of funky brush down in the hollow.

I was watering the new spinach and lettuce when I had that "OH, SHIT!!!" moment and went sprinting back into the house, with everything suddenly adding up.  Adding up horribly.

And so of course with my entry into the house, I realized that 1) the smoke alarm I'd heard had been ours, and 2) the burning smells likewise also belonged to us.  Oh, also 3), which was that our house was now filled (and I do mean filled) with smoke, the alarms had given up the ghost, and there were burned and exploded eggs splattered throughout the kitchen and into the dining room -- and a burning pot on the stove.

I would blame this on old age except that when I was 30 I once did the same thing with the rubber nipples to my son's baby bottles, which I was sterilizing on the stovetop, when I walked away from it and returned to burned rubber, a ruined pot, and a house filled with the toxic smell of burning rubber (luckily both me and the baby were outside). So clearly I am just the kind of person who needs to set a timer and wear it around my neck or just stand there and watch eggs boil and rubber nipples sterilize. Perhaps I should even take up watching paint dry.  Because you just never know.

Airing out cupboards with a fan.

So right now the fans are going full speed, the windows are all open, and the one thing I'm thankful for is the fact that it's going to be warm today so I can leave the house opened up for the rest of the afternoon.

But it was a reminder that homestead or apartment, suburb or country, some things are universal, like leaving something on the stove.  And as the saying goes that there is no use crying over spilled milk, there's also no use crying over exploding eggs, smoky rooms, or curtains that smell like burned eggs.  

On second thought, maybe those are things worth crying over, or at least feeling a heap of stupid about.