This is the sound of my husband making dinner: "oops." It isn't always oops, but tonight, for some reason, it's oops. Do I dare ask why? I'm not sure. I'm either coming down with the flu or recovering from something like it, and I'm not sure I'm in any kind of shape to hear the answer.

Sometimes the sound of my husband making dinner is an extremely loud smoke alarm screeching that we must abandon ship or forfeit our lives. Since this is usually the result of overzealousness on his part and not an actual fire we just open all the windows and turn on the fan and wait for the smoke to dissipate.

It's not just him, of course. One Saturday night as he was working upstairs and I was attempting to make dinner the sound was this, "The oven's on fire! Help!" Yes, that was me. I don't know what I needed help for, but at the time it seemed like the appropriate thing to yell. He came running down the stairs, as he tends to do when he hears me screaming like a banshee, stopped in the living room where I was standing looking into the kitchen, and we both looked at the oven. It's nice that they have the glass on the front so one can watch the fire inside. It was rather pretty, like a fire in the fireplace. However, we already have a fireplace and don't need to turn the oven into one also.

There really wasn't much in the way of help he could offer at that point. I suppose I just wanted someone else to see how pretty a fire in the oven is. We turned the oven off and watched the fire die down. Too bad we didn't have any marshmallows.

One night one of us had put a plate on stove. I don't know why - we were both in the kitchen cooking, and I'm still not used to this new stove. I keep turning on the wrong burner - I'll think something's cooking just as it should only to discover that once again I've turned on the wrong burner. The noise this particular night was the sound a Fiestaware plate makes when it's been sitting on a hot burner for a while - sort of a loud cracking sound followed by flying shards of plate. It's quite exciting. I suppose it must have been my fault.

Occasionally the dog Ash will get in the kitchen and make his own noises. Sometimes it's the sound of something he suspects to be tasty falling off the counter. When we ask him what he's doing in there, the kitchen being behind us, he becomes very quiet, as if we'll just go away and forget about it. We can always tell when he's in there looking for something good - not only do his toenails click on the wood floors, but there's a suspicious sort of non-noise that alerts us when he's up to something. Under normal circumstances he's an ever present noise, unless he's sleeping, which isn't often enough. Every so often one of us will yell out, "Ash, out of the kitchen!" Not that he listens, but it makes us feel like we're doing something about it. He may not even be in the kitchen when we yell that out, which makes us feel foolish, but it doesn't deter us. There's always that chance we can catch him up to something.

One Friday night there was a pizza on the kitchen counter, waiting for the oven to preheat. Me, I don't worry about things like preheating. But Andrew, he's very attentive to things like that. So the pizza was on the counter, and the oven was preheating. And it was very quiet in the kitchen - until Andrew went to put the pizza in the oven and found Ash nibbling at it. A quarter of it was gone, Ash standing up at the counter, turning it as he chewed away at it. The dog can be quite sneaky when inclined.

Sometimes we even have real cooking noises coming from the kitchen. It happens.

Monique Colver lives happily in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two dogs.