I didn’t learn to cook until a few years ago. My college years were spent eating ramen noodles and toaster oven pizzas. I think the few times I tried to cook something, it was either inedible or was nowhere near what I was expecting. People who have parents who rarely cook have to learn the skill elsewhere. Thankfully, the rise in online video hosting has made learning new skills and trades on your own easier than ever before. Still, my process of becoming a cook was not easy to say the least, and aside from making burnt garbage that even my dog wouldn’t touch, I also ran into the issue of almost burning my house down one night while trying to make homemade french fries. It started a grease fire that spread onto my cooktop and started filling my house with billows of smoke. Although I put the flames out in under a minute, the charred remains kept smoldering and all of the smoke kept accumulating in my house. My smoke detectors started going off, and the first thing I did was turn on my air conditioner. I figured that I could put fresh air into my house by simply running the air conditioner, but I had no idea that my particular HVAC is a closed loop. It does not pull in air from outside at any stage in the process, it only circulates indoor air. It took me longer than I would have liked to figure this out, by which point I realized I should have simply opened all of my windows and doors from the get go instead of messing with my central air conditioner.