Tuesday, January 15, 2013

BBQ

I almost burned down my house today.  For the second time.

We heat our home from a wood fired stove.  It is efficient and more importantly, cheap. The idea is to replace the stove with one of those newer fancy gasification stoves so that smoke doesn't choke off the neighborhood.  Really though, it's more about efficiency and how warm I am, than how much we smoke out our neighbors.

Prior to putting in the wood stove, it was just an open fireplace. It was with this regular fireplace that I tried to burn down the house for the first time.  The proof of the first attempt is a few little scorch marks on the wood floor right in front of the fireplace.  We found them the morning after.  So basically, we could have become crusty meat pops overnight.

Not to be outdone by myself, I took a swing at it again, determined to win the stupid award of the century.
This time, I left the door to the stove open.  I had only just lit it, and if you leave the door open for a bit, all the oxygen that is sucked in can really feed the fire and make it roar in no time at all.  Normally, when this is done, you should probably keep an eye on the fire as it bursts to life.  Nope, not me.  I went to check that nothing was happening in the webosphere, because that's critical.



At about the same time that twitter was silently tweeting, I heard an odd rumble bonk.  Or donk. Maybe a clunk.  However you'd like me to describe the sound, just picture two flaming chunks of tree trunk bashing into the door of the stove and trying to dive onto my super cool shag rug.  And you know that any super cool shag rug would catch fire faster than a turpentined cat.

Because you can spit the width of my house, I was available to prevent the torching before the shag got shagged.

We live to try again another day.



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