Turkey defrosting? Check. Potatoes ready to peel and cook? Check. Ingredients for stuffing and pumpkin pie? Check. I’m ready to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Or will be, once the turkey is defrosted (eta sometime before Thursday morning).

The real test as to whether I’m really ready though, will come tomorrow afternoon, when I take off from work early to do some last-minute cleaning before our holiday guest arrives. Yes, we have only one other person coming to Thanksgiving dinner. My father-in-law, who lives just down the street and often sees my kitchen in its natural state. Messy. So, it probably doesn’t matter how much I clean.

The one thing I really want to clean before I start all the baking though, is my oven. Sometime in the past month (no, I don’t know specifically when or how), someone baked something that really spilled over.Given I do most of the baking, it was probably me, although you’d think I would remember that big of a spill. Regardless, I want to get it cleaned before I put the turkey in. But I’ve got a nagging feeling that if I run the self-clean cycle, the door won’t unlock when it’s done and I’ll be stuck figuring that out. It’s a weird thing to think will happen, I know. Especially since the oven is only a year old and it hasn’t given me any problems. But the light wouldn’t come on when I opened the oven to take the picture of the crusty mess. It’s a sign, I just know it.

And it doesn’t help that I work for a company that does DIY videos/repair guides and we recently filmed one about the door-locking-thing happening fairly frequently. So yes, it’s got me thinking that it’s going to happen to me. Just because it can.

Yes, if it does happen, I’ve got the how-to-fix-it info right there. But I still don’t want it to happen to me! So maybe I’ll clean it the old-fashioned way. By hand. Just in case. Now where did I put those SOS pads?