Something that means “when the thing that you are absolutely sure did not happen is the only thing that could possibly have happened.”

Made eggs again this morning, using those cast-iron skillets that supposedly are impossible to fry eggs in. My preferred method for eating fried eggs is to butter two pieces of toast and put one egg directly on top of each, crack the yolks (I like ’em runny) and then eat the whole mess with a fork, using the toast to sop up the remainder of the yolk. This means that I need to have the bread ready to go before the eggs are cooked because otherwise the eggs overcook or I have to move ’em twice, and that rarely works out well.

For some reason this morning I grabbed the wrong size plate. I realized this after I’d buttered my toast but before I put the eggs on top of it, so I grabbed a bigger plate, transferred the eggs from the skillets onto the toast, put the skillets back down on the burners I’d used (note: glass, electric cooktop) and then, barehanded, carried my fried-eggs-n-toast and my glass of tea into the dining room to eat. I set the plate on the table and then, again, barehanded, turned the plate toward me, thus insuring that I’d touched both sides of the plate.

At no point during this process did I ever scream in pain.

While I was eating I noticed that some of the yolk seemed to be scorching onto the plate. “That’s weird,” I thought. “That’s not how yolk works.”

I finished my breakfast and picked up my plate to go put it in the sink.

And pulled the goddamn tablecloth– which is cheap vinyl– halfway off the table.

Somehow, in the all-of-two-minutes it took me to eat two fried eggs on toast and drink a glass of tea, on a plate that I not only carried with my bare hands but turned— that detail is important; it means I touched the plate all the way around– I had managed to melt the plate into the tablecloth.

Which is impossible. I didn’t put the plate on the burners. The damn skillets were on the burners, and the plate was in my other hand. I slid the eggs off the skillets directly onto the toast both times. I couldn’t have set that plate on a hot burner while I buttered the toast because I buttered the toast on a different plate. I have very clear memories of how this went down, and even went into the kitchen and reenacted it before going to tell my wife, who was getting our son ready for daycare, that I’d managed to not only fuck up my own breakfast but destroyed a plate and a tablecloth in the process.

The only way this could possibly have happened is if I somehow set the plate down onto the burners long enough to have gotten scorching hot, immediately completely forgot that I had done that, and then managed to not notice it while I carried the plate with my bare hands into another room that is a good twenty feet away from the stove and then– again– touched both sides of the plate while turning it around. I didn’t do that and yet that’s the only thing I could possibly have done. There’s no way the heat percolated down from the fried egg onto the plate; the egg would have been a cinder. I doubt that’s even physically possible. It not only melted through the top layer of vinyl and screwed up the cloth layer underneath, there’s a visible scorch mark (not black-burned, but it looks like it’s been ironed, maybe?) on the pad that was underneath the tablecloth.

That requires a lot of heat, right?

What the hell, universe?

Also fun: noticing, after the breakfast fiasco, that the dishes were completely out of control, and then realizing that I was doing the dishes while my wife left for work. She didn’t quite pat me on the ass on her way out the door but I could tell she was thinking about it.

I have a couple more posts in mind; they may come later today or I may just write them and preschedule the next couple of days. We’ll see.

FASCINATING SCIENCE! UPDATE:  At the behest of a Facebook friend who is clearly trying to kill me, I reset the burner to the heat level I was using for the eggs, gave it a couple of minutes to warm up, then put the same plate partially on the burner for ten seconds. After that, I went into the dining room, put it on the table, and I’ll be damned if the sonofabitch didn’t melt straight through the tablecloth again.  Furthermore, it was perfectly cool about a centimeter away from the hot part.

Furthermore-furthermore, the plate is gonna be salvageable.  I’m gonna have to do some serious scrubbing and scraping to get the vinyl off, but it’ll do.  VICTORY!

tl;dr: this is a story about how I almost burned my hand and broke a plate and dropped my eggs on the floor, but instead got really lucky and only destroyed a tablecloth.