This evening, we decided it would be a good idea make a frozen pizza. This is our "too tired to make anything else and can't bear to create any more dirty dishes" meal. The pizza, which I had previously folded in half so I could successfully shove it into our tiny freezer, broke when I tried to pry it open. By the time I was done, it had shattered into three large pieces. Unfettered, I placed them in our tiny oven.
Before long, black smoke began pouring from the minuscule apparatus, and I hurriedly opened the door to check on it. Lo and behold, all three sections were melting and drooping between the bars of the baking shelf like a pizza-version of Salvador DalĂ's "The Persistence of Memory." With a trio of inedibley raw dough slabs in mid-bake, there was nothing to do but shove a piece of foil under them and wait.
The hands-off approach proved ineffective. Soon, our whole camper was full of billowing smoke. Tyler and I attempted to rectify the situation with a spatula and a set of tongs, and eventually, we got the slices propped up on the rack. Or so we thought. A few minutes later, they were melting, drooping and smoking again. Admitting defeat, we removed the partially burned, and partially raw pizza from the oven.
In the course of doing so, one of the halves flipped over, splattering pizza sauce on the floor, and our newly-cleaned dish towels. Exasperated, we split the remains and washed them down with a cold beer, all the while zoning out in front of a TV show like nothing had happened.
After dinner we surveyed the pizza wreckage in a stunned silence that was broken only by the occasional chuckle about how absurd our lives are at the moment. The kitchen I worked hard to clean this afternoon is now a tomato-smeared warzone. The oven is a crusty cave of cheesy burnt-on stalactites. Neither of us has the energy to fix another mess tonight—we'll simply have to deal with it tomorrow.
Before we head to bed, Tyler shows me this scene from the movie "The Money Pit", and we both bust a commiserative gut laughing at it: