This little light o' mine.

Unfortunately, we've had something unintentional light up in the apartment in the last twenty-four hours.

I was boiling fat-free chicken broth (which was all I could swallow) last night while sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book. And suddenly, I heard this soft "whoof." I couldn't place it, but it was not a normal house-sound. I looked up and discovered that our electric stove was on fire. Yes, really. The flames were coming up quite nicely around the sides of the pan by the time I took the five steps over to the stove.

I turned off the burner, located the pot holders, pulled the saucepan off the flame, turned the hood fan on, and located a suitable pot-lid to throw over the burner. As I did, it occurred to me that since the contents of the pan weren't what was on fire, and I was pretty sure I didn't have a usefully-smothering seal due to the guts of the range being inter-connected, the fire extinguisher might be more useful. Then the smoke alarm started going off. I disabled it, went back to the stove, and checked the status of the fire. It was almost out, but not quite, so I put the lid back on while I opened the kitchen window and the balcony door to get a cross draft. When I checked again, the fire was out.

I used a spatula to unseat the element so Kendra would know something was wrong, on the off-chance I missed her during another period of unconsciousness. (I did). I have since dissected the incident and made mental notes.

1) Let's hear it for years of being drilled to throw a lid on a stove-top fire.

2) I don't know what was burning. I haven't cooked anything but water on that stove in months due to the Jenny Craig thing. I need to double-check with Kendra and see if we had a boil-over.

3) Boil-overs don't usually result in flame. Steam, at the time. With an eventual possibility of noisome smoke. But not flame.

4) Whatever was burning was located in the drip pan. Mind you, those were filthy when we moved in. So I imagine that the real reason the fire died down was not the pot lid treatment, but lack of fuel (possibly combined with reduced oxygen).

5) This is the same burner that sent current racing through my poor little body in July. The first fix toned it down. The second fix did not seem to help, but when I tested it again later, the current was gone. I mentally tagged it as "possible intermittent problem" and haven't observed a recurrence since then. Is it possible that something sparked into the drip pan, igniting what heat alone wouldn't have?

The plot thickens, and I'm in no shape to play Sherlock Holmes right now.