Burn, Baby, Burn

It's been one of those days.

It was the first day of the dreaded, notorious Organic Chemistry Lab. The place where you need to know the difference between a Buchner and Hirsch funnel. The place where you spend hours watching tiny crystals through a foggy lens, waiting pathetically for a sign of melting. The place where a flask never boils when you want it to and almost certainly boils when you don't.

Needless to say, I was a trifle nervous as I walked into the lab at 1 PM this afternoon and thoroughly exhausted when I tumbled out at 5. The vast majority of the 4 hours in between had been spent in one of two states: 1) Waiting forEVER for something stupid to happen 2) Flailing frantically as 7 important things simultaneous happened beyond my control

I returned to my room, intent on depositing my person on the couch and unplugging my brain for a little while. I noticed that it smelled good as I walked in. At first, I thought that it was due to my improved placement of my Yankee Candle electric air freshner, which has been filling the common room with a pleasant aroma of vanilla since I bough it 3 days ago [Note: my roommates claim that the vanilla device delivers something more like a choking odor rather than a pleasant aroma. However, they have failed to consider the fact that they are completely wrong.]

It was, however, something else that was delivering the smell which I fancied. Inside my oven lay two trays of baking hors d'oeuvre... which I shall henceforth christen aw dervs since this is America and language can change if we all try hard enough. Anyway, I remembered that the guys running the Kedma launch party had asked to borrow our oven to heat up their aw dervs and we said "ok".

At this point I found the couch that I had been craving and turned on some tunes and proceeded to recharge my batteries. A few minutes later, in walked Sarah Breger to check on the aw dervs. I stumbled over as she opened up the oven. "They aren't done?" she asked inredously. "They've been in for over an hour, and they're supposed to cook in 20 minutes!"

I looked at her and grinned, as if to say "You're looking at a guy who's been in orgo lab all day. I know ALL ABOUT how much you're supposed to heat stuff. It takes forever!" And with that thought in my mind I cranked the oven all the way up. Sarah smiled and left. I felt vindicated. Sure, I may have failed today in orgo lab because I could boil my benzoic acid sample fast enough, but at least I won't have that problem with the oven and the aw dervs. I may be a lousy chemist, but I am a divine chef. I sat down at my computer and lost myself in facebook for about 15 minutes.

That's about when the smoke alarm went off.

I jumped up and bolted into the common room. The aw dervs were definitely not doing well, and the smoke was cascading down the front of the oven door like a Waterfall from Hell. With the kind of energy only supplied by rare bursts of adrenaline, I had the windows open in seconds flat, fanned the smoke detector and sat down next to the oven with a small electric fan pointed directly at it.

The top tray is pretty burnt. I hope the Kedma staff doesn't flay me alive. I ruined their aw dervs and now no one is going to read about Israel, or the Jewish people, or baseball or childhood or whatever the heck Kedma is all about. I turned the heat down to make sure I don't burn the lower tray. I hope they finish baking before the launch in 13 minutes...

At the rate I'm going, don't count on it.