steve in hollywood

My friend Allyson lives in Burbank, she’s an actress (of course.) She also is quite a tea lover. Usually when I visit she makes at least two pots of two different kinds of tea. You might be thinking, “Hey, is this going to be a blog about tea? Can I just skip to the flammables?” Well, the tea is important, so you must bear with me. While tea is not in itself flammable, tea is the culprit in this situation. Back to the story.

Allyson had some minor surgery on her leg so I was visiting her to keep her company. Allyson, if you are reading this, stop picking at the bandage. Ahem. So the first pot of tea she made was this barley tea (which, I think I bought her) and I like barley tea, but she added coconut oil to it. (It’s some kind of health thing.) When she finished that I said, “Can I make more tea?” She said yes, but:

“Don’t use the ceramic pot, it isn’t meant to go on the stove. Use the metal one.”

Now, I dare say you would have thought what I thought, which was: use the metal pot on the stove. So, I filled it up with water, turned on the stove, put it on, and left. Unfortunately, this was some special fancy type of metal pot: it was electric.

A few minutes later I smelled something akin to burning plastic. No wait, it was burning plastic. See, there’s some kind of plastic thingy on the bottom of these electric kettles that, well, boy it sure burns nice! I went into the kitchen to find quite the conflagration. I stood there staring at it for, I’d say, five seconds. I was thinking, “Why is this metal tea pot on fire? It should not be on fire. It’s supposed to be there on the stove, boiling the water!”

Then I decided to do… something. I turned off the gas. Still on fire. I took a metal spoon and moved the pot over to a back burner. The front burner stayed on fire. All of the plastic had melted into a flaming morass of goo. I thought, “Well, maybe it will burn itself out.” Then I thought, “Maybe not.” So I called out to my friend and her roommate, who will be forever known as “that Vietnamese boy.”

“Do you guys have a fire extinguisher?”

“What?” <- Allyson, in disbelief

“There is no time for “what?”, I need to know now.“

So, Allyson runs into the kitchen, puts her hands over her face and proceeds to freak out saying, “Oh my God, OH MY GOD!” However, super Vietnamese boy (sorry Q, I can’t help it) finds a fire extinguisher and lets it rip! And then he keeps letting it rip.

“Whoa! Okay! It’s out man! Stop!”

Turns out Allyson didn’t like that kettle that much anyway and she got a cute little red one she had spied out at Target.

Picture of the Day 

How to recognize the difference between an electric tea pot, and a regular one.