A Tay Story (with pictures)

There is always something going on over here! Let me preface this by saying I hate eggs. I rarely eat them so I don't often cook them, hence the problem.

It all began with me deciding yesterday that I should probably get Aiden's easter eggs dyed if I was going to do them at all this year. Aiden & Brian both have birthdays back-to-back this weekend, we're having a party and family is going to be in town so they just had to be done. Yesterday I began boiling eggs while I fed Aiden lunch. He was done, cleaned up and down for a nap when I came back to get the eggs. I had boiled nine, because that's how many my ceramic easter egg display holds. Well, one must have had a crack that I didn't notice because egg white had leaked out of it as it boiled, ruining the egg. I was down to eight. I set up the dyes, dropped the first six in to be colored and then put one egg in a large bowl of water to hard boil in the microwave, to replace the one that had been ruined so I would have nine.

I was standing at the counter closest to our kitchen table (and furthest from the microwave) dying eggs when *KABOOM* there was this sound like a gunshot and I got splattered on the shoulder by something. It made me jump out of my skin! I turned to see that the egg I had put in the microwave had EXPLODED so violently, it had forced the door to the microwave open and shot egg across the entire kitchen! Bits of egg had landed on the kitchen table, the tile and surrounding counters. Yucky egg water was covering the bottom of the microwave and dripping out of the open microwave onto the stovetop below and running down the front of the oven to the floor. I stood completely frozen for a good 15 seconds, just taking in what had happened and cursing myself for not paying attention in high school when the boys used to talk about what would and would not blow up in a microwave.

The mess was awful. The smell of half-cooked, exploded egg filled the house and clean up took nearly an hour. I actually did think to grab my camera & take some pictures, if for no other reason than to prove that eggs will explode when nuked in their shell:







Here is what the stove & counter looked like. Click on the picture to view larger & look at the stove guard. THAT was all over the floor, all the way to the table, too. (Remember I got hit in the shoulder with flying egg debris? I was a full EIGHT FEET AWAY from the blast zone!)



Hilarious, right? I was laughing myself as I cleaned up all the mess. After everything was wiped down, I closed the microwave door and felt it weakly latch. And the light stayed on. I opened the door and closed it again. The light was still on. I pushed the door in harder. No change. So I hit the quick cook button and the microwave beeped an error to tell me the door was open. But it was closed. And the light was still on. OH CRAP!!!! I had broken the microwave.

Fast forward two hours and in walks Cleo, this darling old white-haired man from Beltway Appliance to fix my egg-bombed microwave. He is standing, facing my broken appliance when he asks how the door latch was busted. I tell him the story and although he keeps his back turned and his voice even, I can see his shoulders shake as he tries to hide his chuckles. (Brian was worse. When I called him at work, he could barely talk he was laughing so hard!) So Cleo gets to work disassembling the microwave to reach the popped door latch and disconnected sensor, with egg bits falling out of just about everything he removes. An hour and $75.76 later, the microwave works again!

If I total the cost of a dozen eggs, an egg dye kit, the five bags of candy and three chocolate rabbits from Wal-Mart AND the $75.76 to fix the microwave, this has added up to be a very expensive easter! And no, I never did dye a ninth egg.