Cleaning the Oven!!

I hate to clean the oven so badly that it goes past hate and becomes an abomination.

I do not have procrastinationitis. I just flat out don’t like to do that job. Buying a new stove seemed like a justifiable expense last week when I opened up the door to put a cake inside and saw that the time had arrived. I could buy a new stove or change my will.

At the present time my will states: “Upon the event of y demise, Mr. B is to rush out and purchase a new stove and have it installed before the undertaker can cart my chubby carcass from my house. I will not have all the women n the southern part of Oklahoma and the northern part of Texas bringing barbecued chicken and baked beans to heat up in my oven and see the messy state that it is. If Mr. B does not do this then I hereby promise to put a curse upon his hide which entails something about his next wife not being able to boil water without setting the house on fire and my ghost will refuse to leave the house forever amen.”

I went to price a brand spanking new stove. I looked at the tag and sucked air so long the folks at the appliance store were dialing 9-1-1 before I started breathing again.

I went from there to the Walmart store and bought oven cleaner. It said right there on the spray can that it was guaranteed beyond the shadow of a doubt to clean the oven with no fumes, no broken nails and not even one cuss word. Seemed well worth the $8.95 they wanted for it so I took it home.

When I opened the oven to begin the job I did consider a blow torch or maybe a sand blaster to get the worst of the built up stuff out. But the only person in town who does sand blasting knows my aunt and the next Sunday when he saw her in church, he’d tell her how bad the oven was. Dear hearts, I shudder to think of the phone call that I’d get on Sunday afternoon. It would scorch the hairs right out of Lucifer’s nose.

I considered a stick of dynamite but again, the only person who has any of that knows my uncle and he’d tattle and then my uncle would tell my aunt. Scratch that idea.

Then I remembered the vacuum cleaner and that nice metal thing on the end of the hose. I used the metal like a scoop shovel and sucked enough stuff into the vacuum bag to fill it up. And if you know my aunt, please tell her that I disposed of it with the toxic waste company.

That’s when I learned that you can not buy magic for $8.95 and that the braggin’ rights on the side of the spray can were greatly exaggerated.

I sprayed and then I coughed and sputtered and made a vow that this was the last time I would clean the oven. Even if I had to mortgage all fifteen of my grandchildren and both of my tom cats to buy a stove that costs more than gold ingots, I would not clean the oven until the day the devil set up his own snow cone stand inside the front doors of Hades.

I filled up the galvanized mop bucket with clean water and wiped away the black stuff, all the while sputtering and coughing. Getting to the far reaches of an oven is no job for a sixty year old woman who is not a born again acrobat. I wedged my whole body up to my waist inside the oven and got a cramp in my shoulder.

Fear filled me.

Mr. B was going to find me asphyxiated, half of me in the oven, with the other half dangling out there on the kitchen floor. He’d gone to buy the fixin’s for a pecan pie (which is the worst thing in the whole world to boil out in the bottom of an oven).

He’d take one look at the situation, rub his chin and decide to take the stove and me out together. It would save him the price of a casket which is far more expensive than a new stove.

Finally I managed to cuss my way out of that place. I was sweatin’ hot. My lungs were ruined for life. My fat cells were whining. But that oven was not going to get the best of me. I sprayed it again and put clean water into my bucket. The job was half done and it was senseless to buy a new stove. By night that sorry sucker looked like a brand new oven.

But that’s not the end of the story. The next day I changed my will.

Now it reads. “To my loving husband: My oven is spotless so if I die of some fungal disease to my lungs and do not live to see it get dirty again, make sure you have a big family reunion at my wake. Invite all the relatives and tell them to bring their chicken and baked beans. Tell my aunt to cook at least six pecan pies in the clean oven. Oh, and tell our daughter to make cinnamon rolls, too, so that the brown goo will stick to the bottom of the oven like super glue.”

Then if loving husband gets a new wife, she can crawl inside the oven and clean it out. I’ll be the ghost sittin’ on top of the refrigerator laughing!