I’ve been housesitting in a condo for a friend for the past couple of weeks. You know there is a huge difference between going about your life in a building you occupy all by yourself. And then trying to maintain your usual habits in a building full of other people. I learned that the hard way.

My first weekend here I decided I was going to treat myself to bacon for breakfast. My husband eats bacon just about every day, so it’s not like I am unfamiliar with bacon. I just don’t share his devotion to the meat and therefore it is more of a treat for me then anything else. When we first met he was cooking his bacon in the microwave on a paper plate covered with a paper towel. Despite his efforts I still found the microwave oven needed constant attention from all of the grease. That’s when I bought him one of those “As Seen On TV” nifty little Microwave Bacon Cookers! He loves it!

Growing up my mother cooked us bacon, usually on Saturday mornings, or Sundays if our Saturdays were to busy. Mom cooked the bacon in her cast iron skillet. I remember she poured off the grease into an old coffee can that she kept under the kitchen sink. I asked her once why she was saving it and she said “In case we need it.” Seriously have no memory of us ever “needing it” and I don’t think she ever used it!

I cooked bacon for my kids when they were growing up. Bacon for a family of seven is a lot of bacon! I cooked my bacon in whatever frying pan happened to be laying around and was clean. With a house full of five children your priorities take on a different tone, survival being the most prominent, so it really didn’t matter to me what I cooked bacon in, as long as it was cooked.. Because of who I am, I cooked my bacon on HIGH, frying it up quick, fast and extra crispy, because of the million other things I had to do. I usually burned my bacon along the way, causing the kids to cough and having to throw open the windows while the smoke alarms were blaring. No one really complained, they got fed, we all lived.

Thus this brings us back to my first weekend here in the condo. Honestly my personality hasn’t changed much over the years, so I’m still prone to doing things fast, always rushing ahead of myself. So into the pan went a couple slices of bacon, knob on the stove turned to HIGH and I moved on to popping an English muffin into the toaster and making a cup of coffee. That’s when I realized the kitchen was filling with smoke from my bacon. Seemed normal, until I realized I wasn’t in my own home! What happens if you set off smoke alarms in a building full of other people? I frantically began looking up trying to locate the smoke detectors, not really sure if I was planning on popping the batteries out of them like we did in the “old days”. What I found was they were obviously hardwired smoke detectors and there was also a sprinkler system! My propensity to burn my way through bacon could have disastrous effects, in someone else’s home, if I didn’t learn to slow down, like right now!

I quickly switched off the stove, shoved all the bacon down the garbage disposal, ran the water on full throttle and flipped the switch to the disposal. I had killed the source of the smoke, but there was still a cloud hovering in the kitchen, and beginning to float out into the open concept layout of the condo. My first thought was to open the windows, but there are only two windows in this condo and they are in the bedroom. There’s an exterior door off the living room and an interior door off the kitchen that accesses the common areas of the building. Yup you guessed it, I flew open both of those doors. Standing there in my big fluffy robe with the giant pink roses on it, fanning the door to the interior hallway back and forth while the door to the exterior was letting in the cold air of a nice February morning in Maine! Pretty sure I looked ridiculous, but at that moment I didn’t care. I had saved the entire building, I was good with that.

So this past Sunday, as I stood staring into the fridge, knowing I had to eat up as much of this food as possible before I left in a week, I was faced with the remaining bacon. I decided I could do this, I could cook bacon without smoking everyone out. So I laid the remaining slices in the frying pan and turned the knob to MEDIUM. At first it began to sizzle pleasantly and I was pretty proud of myself for mastering the art of slowing down. Look at me being all zen-like with bacon! I cooked two eggs in another pan and toasted my English Muffin to perfection. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen and as I took a sip out of my cup, I glanced down at my still partially uncooked bacon in the pan. It was sizzling yes, one might even suggest that it was getting crispy on the edges, but my eggs were cooling on my plate, the English Muffin, losing that fresh out of the toaster feeling and yet the bacon did not seem to care.

A few minutes later, as I sat at the kitchen table eating my eggs and English Muffin, sans any bacon, the whirl of the garbage disposal just now fading away. I realized it was a worthy sacrifice. Bacon I believe is over rated. Apparently I don’t have time in my life for bacon. It’s either all or nothing with me, and in this case, it was nothing.