Colossal mistake...

I have been a fairly good homeowner in my adult life.  I was a great tenant, if I may say so, for I always left my apartments better off. I repaired things and left improvements, such as overhead fixtures in the bedrooms that had none.  I also added plants and flowers to the beds outside where possible.

My sister was talking about our father, an engineer, and it struck me anew just how much I learned from him as far as being a homeowner.  You stay on top of things.  You do preventative maintenance. You do not let repairs drag on and on.  My mother's addition to that mantra is that you don't wait to fix things up to sell the house—to make the house better for the next owner—because you should be fixing them up for yourself.  She also warns about looking for tolerances.

Tolerances are the thing that you put up with because the thought of changing them overwhelms you or wearies you or seems too large to tackle.  Only, once that situation or circumstance or _______ in your home has been remedied, you will have more peace and more energy from no longer consciously or unconsciously battling the toll of tolerating whatever it is that was niggling at you.  Sometimes tolerances are a small repair.  Sometimes they are simply rearranging furniture.  Sometimes a tolerance might be reorganizing a kitchen or painting a room.  The idea is to make your home work for you in all ways instead of having your home weigh on your spirit even in a small way.

For me, a tolerance I dealt with recently was three small things needing superglue.  It was not a hard task to tend to them, but in my mind using superglue is always, always a hard task.  Of course, I have switched to the Gorilla Glue brand of superglue and most often use their gel formula.  That does make things easier.  The bottle also never stop up, so you don't have to stick pins or nails through the top.

Anyway, I made a mistake in my oven.  And in trying to remedy that mistake, I made a colossal mistake in my oven.  In my new oven.  SIGH.

You see, for some reason, the newer ovens melt foil if you put foil in the bottom of your oven to keep it clean.  In part, this is because foil has been manufactured thinner and thinner and thinner.  But even if you use the heavy duty foil, it can melt onto the bottom of your oven.  Yes, I have foil stuck to the bottom of my new oven.

When the GE repairman was out to replace the broiler, he mentioned that if you put ketchup on the foil and let it sit for a couple of days it might get up the foil.  Scary that thought.  But I decided I had nothing to lose.  Wrong!

A normal person would have nothing to lose.  But someone with a significantly impaired rememberer has a whole lot to lose ... as in coming close to ruining the bottom of her new oven.  For if you forget that you have a thick layer of ketchup on the bottom of your oven and you use that oven, you will burn to a blackened mass that layer of ketchup.  Ketchup which has tons and tons of sugar in it.  Sugar burns.  And when it burns ... it will remain behind a nuclear holocaust.  SIGH.

I went hunting and hunting and hunting and am working on the backing soda method.  It got some off, but not nearly enough.  So, I am on round three of trying to clean my oven with a baking soda past.  I don't know when I'll be able to use it again because I don't want to continue to bake that mass on.  Plus, the smell is horrible and the smoke sets off the fire alarm near the kitchen.  SIGH.

I thought to post photos, but I am a bit gutted by what I have done to my new oven, so I just couldn't hit the shutter button on my phone.  Stupid Myrtle.  Stupid, stupid Myrtle.

I am, of course, open to any method for getting blacked ketchup off of the bottom of an oven.
SIGH.