The Battle of the Flaming Oven

I finally broke down and cleaned the oven today. Well, to be honest I sort of had to.  And to be more honest, it was closer to genocide than cleaning. It was a long story ...




On Wednesday I almost lost the battle with the keeper of the oven door. He demanded the password before he would let me fully open the door. Unfortunately, they had changed the password since the last time I had used the oven. I was ready to give up and forgo making my casserole, but ...






Along came this nice fellow and blabbed the new password. Then they had to let me in to bake my casserole. (I think he knew that my casserole was going to bubble over and leave the oven floor covered in all sorts of new detritus.)






Unfortunately, after a day or so, the detritus on the oven floor started to grow and breed some pretty funky creatures. They started chanting and demanding food in loud voices. They were even keeping Molly the dog and I awake at night.



This was the local gang leader. He seemed to exercise a deep and dark control over the rest of the mutants inhabiting the oven floor. Note the natural camouflage. He blended right in with spillage coating the oven floor. He (or maybe she) never communicated directly with me, but instead sent his/her lawyer/mouthpiece to yell at me.



This was his mouthpiece.  One of the better arguments in favor of adaptive evolution and lawyers.

Yesterday I finally demanded to be taken to their leader. I really didn't have a choice. When I opened the oven door, I found a group of the mutant beasties dancing round a large fire on the oven floor. It's really hard to cook a pizza over an open flame like that. Besides, it smelled really bad.





This handsome fellow took me by the ear and pulled my head to the back of the oven to talk to the queen of the mutants. She informed me that my repeated attempts to destroy her little kingdom by turning on the heat in the oven had to stop or it was going to be all out war.

The queen and I discussed the situation for a bit. She was adamant that I quit turning on the heat and wanted guaranteed delivery of new food supplies. I stuck to my demands to allow the cooking of  my pizza pie. I was saving my demand to cut the chanting off at midnight for the final phase of negotiations. We were at a stand still. It looked like the only hope of peaceful coexistence was to call in an outside negotiator. So I asked Molly the dog to step in and suggest a solution. Molly was unable to achieve a breakthrough. Molly started barking and running in circles and the queen declared war on me.



I felt fully justified in pulling up the door shields and locking the oven door. Then I set the timers and left for a few hours. When I returned, all that was left was a fine coating of gray ash. Thus ended the battle of the flaming oven. Sometimes mass genocide is the only way.

It seems lonely today without the background chanting. Even Molly looks quizzically at the oven from time to time. Maybe she is seeing ghosts.