Banished - August 14, 2025

I have banished myself from the house today.  It's toxic - or at least stinky.  It's my fault.

Yesterday, for dinner, I braised a pot roast with potatoes, carrots, and onions.  The braising liquid was gravy.  I cooked it in big skillet that is wide but not very deep.  It has a lid that fits fairly tightly.  When I took it out of the oven to check it for the first time, the lid had sealed itself to the rim - had to pry it off with a knife.  After I broke the seal, checked the roast, and returned the skillet to the oven, the gravy boiled out and made a huge mess in the bottom of my oven.

Admittedly, that oven was not particularly clean to begin with, but this disaster was of a magnitude that precluded further use of the oven until after some cleaning occurred.  This is a self-cleaning oven.  I did not want to run it last night; it stinks up the house something awful, to the point where it's uncomfortable to breathe.

(Might not be so bad if I cleaned it more regularly, eh?)

I knew that I would forget to run the cleaning cycle unless I left myself a reminder that would be hard to miss.  A yellow post-it note on the stovetop would have done the trick, but I couldn't find one in the junk drawer where the pad usually lives, but there was a pack of playing cards in that drawer, and I figured they'd work just as well.  The pack stuck out like a sore thumb against the black glass stovetop.  I said to The Husband, "I'm laying a pack of cards on the stove to remind me to run the cleaning cycle tomorrow.  Don't put it back in the drawer."  

He didn't, and it was the first thing I saw this morning when I staggered to the coffee pot.  

The cleaning cycle commenced.  

I took my coffee out to the porch, as usual.  

About 2 hours later, I started smelling something and realized it was the oven.  I went inside to look through the glass to make sure nothing was actually on fire.  All good, so far.  But smoke was pretty thick in the house.  I turned on the vent-a-hood fan and shut all the bedroom doors and put a box fan in the window of my sewing room.  When the smoke cleared a little, I started scrubbing the oven racks.  (The Husband said we're supposed to take the racks out before running the cleaning cycle.  This seems positively ridiculous to me, but I did it.)    

I've been on the porch, painting, ever since.  

A couple of days ago, I watched a video in which a lady was making mushroom/fairy houses out of a toilet paper roll and some home-made air-dry clay.  It made me drool, wanting to try it.  Almost everything one would need to duplicate the process was already in my house, except for a battery-operated tea light, and I can get that later.  So when I yanked off the last paper towel, I saved the cardboard tube.  

Check.

The next day, I watched somebody make air-dry clay.  Yesterday morning I made some.  It is on my kitchen counter, twisted up in plastic wrap.  (I hope the heat from the oven isn't cooking it.)

Check.

Yesterday afternoon, I started drawing/cutting on the tube.  Had to cut out a door and some windows with an exact-o knife.  Very tedious.  Had to try twice.  I made a little platform for everything to sit on, made some steps leading up to the door, made a pointy circular roof.  

There was one other thing I didn't have, which I deemed fairly necessary, and that was joint compound or some other stiffening agent to support the toilet paper roll so it won't buckle under the weight of the clay.  If I hadn't seen joint compound used in some other videos about other things, I'd probably not have gone to the hardware store for a tub of joint compound; I'd probably have come up with some other means of support (stuff the tube with quilt batting, maybe.  Whatever.).  But I needed potatoes for the roast, anyway, and the grocery store is next door to the hardware store, so . . . . 

If I wanted to, I could start assembling a fairy house while the oven finishes cleaning.