I’m in my lovely new apartment, and I do mean new. Nobody’s lived here before - the previous residents were pigeons, and before that, decades ago, this was a commercial building. So, everything I do here is a first - including filling the place with acrid smoke.
Since I’ve moved in, I’ve been doing that whole unpacking thing. One of the things I discovered was a bag of tortilla chips, so I decided a great “christening” activity would be to make nachos! I fired up the oven - preheat to 375, as per my own tastes when it comes to melted cheese. In a few minutes, the oven started smoking.
2 hours, 4 stingy eyes, two fans, one concerned passerby, one Google search, and one smoke-filled living room later, I’ve discovered that many new ovens have a “breaking in” period, during which they’ll burn off the nasty things used to construct them - oils, solvents, paints, etc. Occasionally this also includes things like “tape the contractors forgot to remove” and things like that - but I’m firmly planted in the ‘this is normal’ mindset right now. If I thought there was something wrong with the oven, I’d have to contact someone ‘responsible’ for that sort of thing, and then I’d probably end up oven-less, or looking stupid. Neither of those two are appealing, so I’ve got this thing on a self-cleaning cycle, and while the fans aren’t doing a good job of getting the smoke out of the apartment, at least it appears the oven has stopped producing the nasty stuff. (That does assume that the mix of strange chemicals in the air hasn’t so impaired my judgment that I’m no longer capable of noticing smoke pouring out of an oven. And if I were an alien invader, in the form of smoke, that’s exactly how I’d handle taking over the earth.)
You might be wondering why I have all these fans and still have a ton of smoke here - it’s actually very easy to explain. I can’t open the windows, because the hinges and handles haven’t been installed yet. I didn’t know you could get windows without those sorts of things, but apparently all that stuff gets thrown out the window (pun unintended, I swear) when you’re dealing with a “historic building.” Hinges and handles be damned - what’s important is that the outside of the building remain largely unchanged. This would be more understandable if this were an attractive brownstone, or a late 1700s whatever… but this is more of an early 1900s industrial nightmare. But, it’s historic, so the ugliness is sacred.
I’d keep writing about this, but I can’t really see the screen so well anymore, so I’m going to be stepping out of this place for a bit. Don’t blame me if the smoke aliens set up their Earth outpost in my apartment - I just wanted to make nachos.