“Do you smell something burning?” My Darling B asked me the other night as I was watching something on television.

I put the program I was watching on pause, because that’s how you smell things better, and sniffed the air.

“No,” I answered, “but then I can’t smell much at all right now.” We’re both getting over headcolds that were so bad they would, in the middle ages, have been characterized as some version of the plague, or at least a witch’s curse.

B went back to doinking around on Facebook and didn’t appear to be too concerned, so I continued watching television for exactly one and a half minutes, stopping when B looked up again, sniffed the air and said, “Something *is* burning.”

I paused the video again and sniffed the air. Nothing. I looked around for signs of smoke, but didn’t see anything like that, either. B waited about ten seconds for me to get up and look around, but my feeling was that if she wasn’t concerned enough about the smell of something burning to get up herself, then I wasn’t too worried, either, particularly when I didn’t smell anything at all.

She went through the dining room into the kitchen. “Oh, SHIT!”

Well. That’s probably not good.

After finally levering my butt off the sofa and joining B in the kitchen, I found that the coffee pot I set on the stove top when cleaning up after dinner was leaning at an angle toward the small burner in the front corner which was, coincidentally, still switched on at a very low setting but still hot enough, evidently, to melt the plastic base of the coffee pot. We have a stove with one of those flat black ceramic tops that heats up pots and pans by way of magic. We frequently use it as extra counter space because our kitchen is so small, even though we know that’s probably not a good idea, for obvious reasons. I rescued what was left of the coffee pot, then fetched a putty knife from the garage and scraped as much of the melted plastic as I could off the stove top.

We were still going to need the coffee pot in the morning, so I whittled down a cork from a wine bottle and hot-glued it into the gap melted out of the bottom of the pot, giving it a pirate’s peg-leg so it could stand upright on the countertop in the morning. It’ll serve until its replacement arrives in the mail sometime after the holidays.

And for the foreseeable future I guess I’ll have to jump whenever B asks if I smell something burning.