Fire = Bad + Funny

I never had a problem with fire until I met my husband. Now, I have plenty of experience with fire. My first brush with flames didn't actually involve fire, just lots of smoke. I was cleaning the kitchen once and set the cat food bowl on the counter so I could mop the floor. After I finished in the kitchen my husband and I went to the store. When we came back the house was full of smoke. It turns out I didn't set the cat food bowl on the counter, I set it on the toaster oven that was on the counter. The toaster oven with the little buttons on top that you push to turn it on and pick the heat setting. I didn't want to put the food bowl back on the floor until the floor was dry, but apparently my cats needed a snack while we were gone. They had the toaster oven turned on and their food bowl was melted all across the top and down the sides, pieces of burnt and crispy cat food swimming in the liquid plastic.

I wasn't actually involved in the other fire stories, except as an innocent bystander after the fact. One involved my neighbor 'C' from the cripple junkie fight. He cooked lunch one day and then came over to our house and sat around on the porch with my husband. I think beer might have been involved. They were sitting there, minding their own business, when another neighbor walked over and asked if C was barbecuing at his house. They looked over at his house and smoke is billowing out from the back of the house.

It turns out he left a pan of grease cooking on the stove when he left. His kitchen was totally ruined, plus there was a lot of smoke and heat damage all through the house. His TV melted, just like my cat food bowl. The blades on his ceiling fan were hanging straight down. He ended up living in his garage while his house was repaired. I was driving home and passed a fire truck leaving my subdivision. Interesting, I thought. When I got home I was just thankful that it hadn't been my house. Not yet, at least.

About a month or two later, I'm coming home again. I pull up in front of my house and see the stove laying on it's side in the front yard. That's something you don't see every day. The house reeks, there's smoke everywhere, and my husband is sitting on the porch swing drinking beer. I'm noticing a distinct relationship between fire and beer. What happened was someone (my husband swears it was me, but I'm pleading the 5th) put a plastic tray in the oven. My husband turned the oven on and started fixing dinner, then started smelling something burning. He looked over and there were flames coming out from the edges of the door of the oven. He had a fire extinguisher, so he tried to put out the fire, but of course the fire extinguisher was empty.

Luckily, my husband drinks beer. Why is that lucky, you ask? Did he shake up a beer and drown the fire in sudsy goodness? No, he had a bottle of C02 that he used when we had kegs of beer for the larger parties. Keg parties will have to be an entry of their own. So he took the bottle of C02 and sprayed that all over the fire. Then he decided he needed to get the stove out of the house since it reeked of melted plastic, but the stove wasn't plugged in. When we fixed the house after the flood we put the stove about 2 feet from the fuse box, so instead of running a wire and putting in an outlet, we just wired the stove directly into the fuse box. That slowed him down a little, but he was able to finally get the stove in the yard where it belonged.

The last fire story, surprisingly enough, also involves beer. I was sitting at home, minding my own business, when my husband calls. We were finally moving out of the flood plain into a brand new house on the hill. Cue the Jefferson's theme song. He had been up at the construction site hooking up our camper so we could hang out up there and watch the house be built. Good idea, right? So anyway, he calls up and says "Get up here right now! The camper's on fire! Oh, and on the way stop at the liquor store and get some beer." Right, I think, sure the camper's on fire. He just wants me to bring him some beer. So like the good wife that I am, I get his beer and start driving up to the new house. On the way I pass a fire truck. Hm, where have I seen this before?

I pull up to the new house, and the camper looks fine. No charred pile of rubble, no billowing cloud of smoke. I get out of my car and give my husband the beer. He starts telling me the whole story. He hooked up the electric, and then started turning on the refrigerator. Campers use propane refrigerators so you can use them if you're out in the wilderness. Propane means fire, in case you didn't know. How a fire can keep food cold is beyond my understanding, but somehow it does.

He had problems getting the pilot to light. He tried a couple of times, and then he heard a whoosh sound like something caught fire. Something had. A bunch of birds, or mice or something, had built a nice little house in the flue pipe. Up in flames. So my husband ran over to the construction people, who luckily had a hose they had been using. He was able to put the fire out before the fire department got there.

They were really bummed out about not being able to use their hoses to play firemen. You see, our town is so dinky we have a volunteer fire department. They are sort of like superheroes, mild mannered bank teller on the surface, daring fireman when paged. So now the firemen had to all go back to their boring day-to-day jobs and not hang around in their little helmets and axes.