I'm new here, I don't know any better.

New discovery? Crock pots: much harder than you'd initially think.

Case in point? Don't put all your dinner-related shit in a crock pot, turn it on high, and then go take a nap. Because that shit will burn. It will burn hard.


We'll put this lesson in our little mental locked boxes, along with other valuable grown-up lessons I've learned along the way. Greatest hits, like, "Shower liner and shower curtain: not the same thing," "Don't try to go down icy steps with a pot of boiling water," and "That funny little lever in the chimney? Pull that before lighting a fire."

Man, that was a lesson learned, pre-How2in6. There's a good story I can tell for tonight. Back when I was a young whippersnapper, and was living on my own in my first "real" apartment (that wasn't a dormroom or a bedroom in a sorority house), the centerpiece of my one-bedroom apartment was the fireplace. I was broke, so all winter (midwest, shit-freezing-in-your-rectum cold kinda winter) I kept the temperature at a solid 60 degrees and wore multiple layer. Finally, I got the grand idea to start a fire in the fireplace. In an apartment this small, surely a nice big fire in my big fireplace will heat us all nicely!

So I stealthily went around the complex, stealing peoples' newspapers to use as kindling for my fire. I hoarded them back to my apartment, stuffed them in the fireplace, and lit a corner with a Bic lighter from my purse. I rubbed my chapped, freezing hands together like an old timey hobo and waited for the flame to light up the stack of newspapers and magazines.

It did. Quickly. Then the smoke came.

Lots of smoke.

Lots of smoke and lots of tiny fiery bits of burned, ashy paper that snowed down upon my apartment as I began to panic and realized I'd done something horribly wrong. Then the smoke alarm went off. I had no idea I even had a smoke alarm, let alone where it was. It was on the ceiling, and I was faced with the predicament of: Do I turn off the smoke alarm, or do I stop the fire?

What ensued was this frantic (and I'm sure, hilarious) dance of running to the kitchen and filling a pot of water, and running to the smoke alarm and jumping up and down frantically while punching it, running to the kitchen to get the pot and dumping it on the fire, then running to punch the smoke alarm -- still beeping -- some more.

The end result was a drenched fireplace, a smoky apartment with ash everywhere, and a broken smoke alarm hanging from the ceiling by wires.

That's when I heard the fire engines.

My elderly downstairs neighbor, who was used to me never being home, assumed something had gone horribly wrong in the apartment, and since I probably wasn't home (and because the alarm had been going off so long before I'd punched it to death), surely we needed the fire department to intervene.

So you can imagine how annoyed the firemen looked when I answered the door, covered in soot and still panting from my frantic punch-water-punch-splash dance, and had to explain what had happened. Then one of the very annoyed firemen came in and showed me this nifty thing called a "flue". And if you pulled on this little lever right here, it opened up the flue and little accidents like this didn't happen.

And so, after apologizing profusely to the firemen, apologizing profusely to the landlord, who came storming down to see why the fire department had been called, and spending the rest of that freezing January night with my windows open to air out the smoke, I chalked it up to a valuable lesson learned.

I haven't lived anywhere with a fireplace since.