I can’t boil water!

I can’t boil water. I can’t even kill the teakettle. However, I can melt a kitchen sink drain.

Last night I put the teakettle on to boil water for tea and forgot about it until I smelled something hot. I jumped up from the couch and ran to the kitchen, feeling quite relieved the teakettle wasn’t ruined. Caught it just in time. Thinking a burst of water to cool it down might cause the hot metal to warp, I set it in the stainless steel sink to cool and went back to the couch. A few minutes later I realized the folly of that move when I detected a new odor - scorching rubber. Once again I raced to the kitchen, pulled the teakettle out of the sink and placed it on a cold burner, where, God knows, anyone with half a brain would have put it in the first place. Now the bottom of the sink was discolored, the rubber seal was smoldering, and the plastic drain had melted, almost falling off the bottom of the sink. It was a proud moment.

This morning I rummaged through plumbing supplies and found a new drain. Less than two minutes of sanding with an orbital sander took away the discoloration and in about 15 minutes the sink drain was back to doing what it was supposed to be doing – with an shiny new drain to boot.

Out of all of this I realized the reason a teakettle has a whistle on it isn’t so you know the instant it starts boiling. God made teakettle whistles so you don’t forget the teakettle is boiling. Mental note to self: Put the damn whistle in the teakettle!

This entry was posted on February 19, 2007 at 10:19 am and is filed under Life, All. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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