Oh, no! The kitchen's exploded!

If you participated in the "How Long Will It Take For Fitz To Obliterate Something In The Apartment?" pool, whoever selected "the second morning in the place" is the winner, with bonus points to anyone who specified an explosion in the kitchen.

I didn't take a photo of the damage, so I'll just take the Action News Team path and show you the much cleaner aftermath.

"I'm live at the very spot where, 12 hours ago,
Mark Fitzhenry exhibited the IQ of a doorknob."

The piece you see across the back two burners is what is left of the glass sheet that covered the stove top. Pre-mishap, the stove (which is part of the oven/dishwasher combo) looked like this:

I don't have a coffee maker yet, so I have opted to drink instant coffee. It's not my favorite thing to drink in the morning, but mediocre-tasting beverage with caffeine > no caffeine. (Newton came up with that one, I think.) So I began by placing a kettle on the front left burner of the stove top. You know where this is going now, don't you? Well, when I looked at the surface of the stove top, I just dismissed it as being normal in the Czech Republic -- like the toaster that doesn't pop but instead has two contraptions with handles you use to lower the bread into the toaster and lift it out when it's finished. The notion that the surface covering the burners just might be glass never occurred to me, and neither did the development that the water was taking longer to boil than it should have.

I shuttled into my bedroom to consume my toast with nutella, a banana, swiss cheese, salami, and instant coffee. If heating a kettle on top of a piece of glass was the dumbest decision I made in the past four years this morning, eating breakfast in my bedroom was the smartest. Because I had barely finished my first piece of toast when I was interrupted by a loud pop followed by the loud crash of glass breaking in the kitchen. My first thought was that a piece of the satellite landed early. I emerged from the bedroom and found the kitchen floor and stove top littered with shards of glass. And that's how I added to the list of great household explosions.



Thankfully, this little incident occurred after I walked Baldy, but I still had about 45 minutes before I had to meet one of my bosses for a visa run to Berlin. And oh, by the way, my roommate whom I had yet to meet was arriving at some point today. So with the help of a brush, dustpan and vacuum cleaner, I cleaned the place up with just enough time to bolt, catch the bus and begin the rest of my day, which had little choice but to get better.

As for the aftermath, I've reported the incident to the school and they're contacting the landlord to see if/how much I'll have to pay for it. I imagine it'll depend on if the stove top was purchased by the landlord or one of the previous residents, who had this apartment for a while and left quite a few goodies for us.

Reader mail

I'm belatedly posting these questions about Baldy from Jen in Colorado: "Will Baldy have to go into quarantine when you get to Prague? Also, will you teach him commands in Czech? I think you should : )"


Baldy did not have to go into quarantine. The paperwork, which included a bi-lingual European Union form filled out by my veterinarian and a rabies certificate, allowed Baldy to join Czech society without quarantine. I'm still working on finding out if I have to register him here with the police or clerk of court or the ghost of King Wenceslas. As for the commands, I'll probably just stick to English. In South Korea I'd sometimes refer to his water as mul. I also mixed "sit" with the Korean equivalent of anja; neither worked unless he was about to eat a meal.