How to make friends with your neighbors and throw a good party

Last night I had invited some people over to play some games. Amberly came over early to help me get ready and we decided to fix a pizza for dinner. Amberly put the pizza in the oven and as I was finishing cleaning the bathroom I heard "Hey Andi, what does this little lever do?" By the time I had yelled back not to touch it Amberly had said "Oh. It's locked."

I run into the kitchen and sure enough Amberly had flipped the self-cleaning lever which had locked the oven shut. With the pizza inside. For those of you who don't know what the self-cleaning function on an oven does, it takes the temperature up to some uber high temperature like 500 F and chars everything so it can just be brushed out. And since the oven gets that hot, it locks for safety.

This is all great if you have small things stuck on the bottom of the oven that need charred off. It's not so great if you have a whole cheese pizza in the oven. I was sure we were going to burn down the apartment building. So after a few minutes of Amberly and I yelling and pulling on the lever, I flipped the breaker for the oven. This kept the oven from burning the pizza, but it did not unlock it.

Amberly and I tried to call people to see if anyone knew what to do, but no one answered. I noticed that there were directions for cleaning the oven. I figured if we could trick the oven into going through the whole self-cleaning cycle in a couple of minutes then we would be golden. We flipped the breaker back on and tried to reset the cleaning cycle. It didn't seem to be unlocking the oven and after smoke started coming from the oven we flipped the breaker back off.

Shortly after this the power went out in my apartment complex and the complex next to mine.

The night just got better.

We busted out the flashlights and then realized that my apartment was FILLED with smoke. We quickly opened the windows and then heard sirens. I think I would have laughed my butt off if the fire department had showed up at my door. They didn't, but we panicked and Amberly fixed her hair in case they did.

Eventually the smoke cleared and people still came over. Note: If you lose power, cancel your party. It's really awkward for everyone to sit around in the dark. No matter how nice of a fire you have in the fireplace. The power came back on after 2 hours and saved the party.

I'm not sure if we caused the power outage. I kind of hope we did. It would make the story that much better. This morning I heard a girl at church talking about how she was at a friends apartment and the power went out. Apparently they didn't have any candles and it ruined their party. It made me laugh. Really hard.