There are two ways to test a smoke detector. One is to stand on a chair and press the “test” button.

The other is to fill your kitchen with smoke and see if the alarm goes off.

One guess as to which option I chose.

The story starts out innocently enough. I had a left-over ham bone in the fridge and decided to make some soup. My husband was away for a couple of days, so getting caught up with a make-ahead meal seemed like a good idea.

I dropped the bone in a pot, filled it with chicken broth, threw in a handful of frozen mixed vegetables, and put the fire on medium high.

Soon the aroma of ham and pea soup was filling the air, so I decided to check my email on the computer in the back room. And then I jumped on Facebook to see what was happening.

Someone posted a song by Frank Sinatra, and I found myself listening to some of his other tunes as well as some other holiday favorites.

I was quite relaxed.

Until I smelled something burning.

I jumped up, ran to the kitchen and saw smoke. The liquid had boiled out of the pot, and all that was left was a charred ham bone and a pot spewing out thick smoke.

Immediately, I turned off the fire and then spent the next half hour turning on fans and opening windows. I counted myself extremely lucky there hadn’t been a fire and no damage had been caused.

Thirty minutes later, the smoke was gone from the house, but the burnt smell remained. And here’s where I came to a fork in the road.

It’s one thing to do something incredibly stupid when I’m alone. That act of stupidity jumps to a whole new level when I have to tell someone else – my husband who would never leave something cooking on the stove unattended – what I did.

Guess which option I chose.

I had 24 hours.

I stopped at the store the next day, bought two cans of Febreeze and sprayed every single room in the house.

Next I opened all the windows and turned on all the fans. I had to sit in the living room with a jacket and a blanket, but after three hours, the smell seemed to be gone.

I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking I’d covered up the fiasco. Until I went to set the house alarm. While opening the windows, I’d accidentally broken one of the alarm seals.

Still trying to escape admitting my stupidity, I sent my husband an email, nonchalantly mentioning I might have broken one of the alarm seals while airing out the house. I conveniently left out why I was airing out the house, but I rationalized that was a minor detail.

The next day, my husband returned, fixed the alarm and didn’t say anything about any smoke smell. I thought I’d gotten away with it and then the guilt hit.

Sighing, I told him the real reason I was airing out the house. He said he’d smelled the smoke right away and was just waiting for me to give him the whole story.

I’ve learned my lesson – never walk away from anything cooking on the stove and every month, test all our smoke alarms the easy way – press the button on the front.

And, just in case things do go wrong, belly up to the bar early on. Eventually, those chickens, or in this case a ham bone, come home to roost.
 
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.