Dusk came in behind curtains of virga, otherworldly mauve in sunset’s banked furnace. In the distance, thunder, rumbling like bowling balls. Such an ugly day, today: 112 in the shade and muggy, so wet that even inside an air-conditioned box the water condenses on your face, you can’t tell the difference between air, water, and sweat and maybe there isn’t any. Difference, I mean, ou différance. So, so flicking hot.
The morning started with another little disaster. I stuck a piece of bacon in the microwave, set it to 35 seconds. So I thought. God only knows what I really entered in the punch-pad. Set the teakettle over the fire. Funny smell: figured the stove was dirty (damn it, another mess to clean up!), but it would burn off. Smell > stink. What? Where?
Where? In the microwave. Bacon carbonized, paper about to catch fire. Rescue, dump in sink, pour water over it. Stink expands to fill all space available, which happens to be the entire habitation in which I and the dog live.
Seven a.m. and it’s a hundred degrees out there. Shut off the air conditioning. Open all the doors and windows. Turn on every fan in the house as high as it will go.
Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Pray. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Clean the microwave. Pray again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…
Get the yellow stuff off the microwave’s interior surface, but figure all that scrubbing’s doing naught to get the stink out of the hidden interior parts.
Remember what happened when My Bartleby set fire to her lunch in the office microwave, ruining the microwave once and for all. Price range for replacement over-the range microwaves: $260 to $940. Tra la la! Who doesn’t have that laying around the house?
Hot literally, hot metaphorically. In this endless day nothing goes right. Blackboard, the electronic infrastructure that’s supposed to enhance and simplify the delivery of our courses, went down the instant classes started. Yes. After all those weeks and months of building extravagant, magnificent, elegant courses for our students, the damn thing is down. And it’s not coming up. So much work, so many hours and days and weeks of toil in the hot, hot summer: down the toilet.
Let’s heat it up some more, at the local level: my iMac’s hard drive crashes. It will take $209 to get the damn thing running again. My students can’t get online, and neither can I.
IT to college community:
Update: 8/24/2010 – 7:30 pm
Dear Faculty and Students:
MCCCD and Blackboard teams met again at 5:00 pm this evening to continue working through the connectivity and performance issues. Although additional changes were made throughout the afternoon, we regret to inform you that nothing significant has changed and the connectivity/performance issues continue.
Blackboard will continue with diagnostics and monitoring throughout the evening with 2 hour updates to MCCCD. MCCCD and Blackboard will again convene, via conference call, at 7:00 am in the morning. We will send another update to you as soon as that call completes.
I hunger. Bowling balls in the sky warn against firing up a barbecue, but I want a steak. I do not want to clean more grease off the stovetop. So instead I fire up the broiler, 112 degrees in the shade notwithstanding. What can it matter if the kitchen is a few degrees hotter?
Cooking a steak under an electric oven’s broiler is not unlike microwaving it. Even if you top it with butter, it still comes out gray all over. Oh well. It tasted pretty good.
Hot, so hot. Decide to risk a lightning bolt and dive into the pool. Haul out, cooled down enough to walk the dog. But nooo….
Like popcorn, drops of rain bounce against the patio roof. Slow popping at first, and then a magical frantic rattle. Rain! Actual desert rain.
The desert smells like rain, dust and creosote perfuming the air. Sweet. Finally, sweet.
I do not think God has a gender. She is not a He and He is not a She, though if forced to choose, I’d lean toward She, that being compatible with my subjective point of view. But what He or She invents hideous parasites to torment Its creations? For that matter, what kind of He or She thinks up a mosquito?
Whatever It is, It’s capable of putting on quite a lovely, scented show at the end of a day, a show that turns the day from hideous to tolerable. More than tolerable.
Yesterday, I managed to get through the various local crises fairly calmly. Three months of work on my courses down the tubes. A $2,000 computer melted down. Oh well!
But by midmorning today, I was showing signs of my own melt-down. Not being able to get the boxed computer onto a luggage dolly (to cart it up five stories to the repairman’s office) without causing the dolly to fall apart…that one just about did me in. Freaking flat broke and looking at $210 to fix the computer, $500± to replace the microwave, three months of work down the tubes, 26 students wondering what to do in the absence of course materials, a concentrated 8-week composition course to rewrite right now for no extra pay, no clue how to sell ad space for the Bach Festival program and a deadline of mid-September, a $500 drawdown from Fidelity reduced to 77 cents this month after I told the dude four times not to cut it until the September payment, and—oh, why not?—a white ring on the Stickley side table after a glass sweated water condensation all over it.
Rain is angels weeping.
How do you do it? You make a VERY bad day into a good read. Thanks – sorry your pain brings us enjoyment. Something wrong with that I know. Good luck with the microwave.
When it rains, it pours??? Ouch.
I think I learned this on the Guardian’s food blog after someone microwaved kippers a little too long.
Microwave vinegar for as long as it takes. I googled a bit and times differ wildly. Some suggest a 50/50 water/vinegar mixture. And make sure it doesn’t superheat (so use an old glass). If the microwave still works the vinegar/vinegar steam should get to wherever the smells are hiding.
Another good solution for odors is to put a few drops of vanilla on a small plate or bowl & set it out in the room (probably would work in a microwave too). Or, if you have any essential oils around, a few drops of them on a plate or paper towel (lavender works wonders on really persistent odors).
Steaks – we use an iron skillet or grill pan in our electric oven & they don’t turn out gray. We usually use a really hot oven (instead of the broiler).
Where I am, it’s 107 & more humid than usual – used to live in Central Texas where your current type of weather is the norm in the summer. The first time I went back to visit after I moved, I could hardly breathe outside.
I can’t imagine the kind of heat you endure. Here in the interior of B.C., my furnace is threatening to run in the morning, and the A.C. goes in the afternoon. And if that doesn’t pinch my frugal (sounds so much better than cheap) soul, I don’t know what does.
@ Anne: ohhh carbonized kippers! Horrors…that would be even worse than carbonized pig flesh. When My Bartleby set fire to the office microwave (which, as it happens, belonged to me), I brought the thing home and tried the vinegar treatment. Put it on a table outdoors and ran vinegar through it for a long, long time…like half an hiour or 45 minutes. Did it repeatedly. Didn’t work.
I tried several other DIY ideas found on the Web. None of them worked.
Problem is, when greasy smoke gets into a microwave, two things happen: first, it permeates the plastic interior, and you can’t get the stink out of the plastic; and second, it covers the interior parts that you can’t access without taking the machine apart. Those little vents and perforations you see on the inside of the micro lead to the operating parts. Grease laid down in the machine’s innards is permanently laid down, and if it’s greasy smoke, then the stink is permanently laid down. The only way you can get rid of the smell, marginally, would be to take it apart and clean all the parts. Since you would then have to get it back together right to avoid being exposed to microwave radiation every time you turn the contraption on, that task is best left to an expert…who likely would charge you more than the machine is worth.
For that reason, vanilla and essential oils are no more effective: they don’t get rid of the cause of the smell.
@ valleycat and Nola: July and August are really the only intolerable months here. It stays warm into October, but most times when the days are warm the nights cool off, and that makes it pleasant enough. Remember: you can’t shovel heat! 😉