Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Fire in the hole!

Wow! Today I got a jolt of adrenaline that I am still coming down from!
It has been freezing here in our house and something is not right with the furnace and heater so we have been making fires. Feeling very industrious I emptied the ashes from the fireplace into the paper bag in the garage that contains the past few days worth of ashes. Then I make a fire and go about our business, all three kids home, getting over colds, relaxing and eating etc.
I remembered I had to wash Jonah's bedding and went into the garage to start the wash to find a smoldering bag of ashes. I immediately took the bag out to the deck while it burst into flame. Trying to decide what to do, I thought it might just burn up the bag and then burn out, it certainly seems to happen that way when I'm trying to make a fire in the fireplace, so I tossed it into a plastic bucket near the hose spigot.
I turn on the hose and squeeze the handle of the sprayer and nothing happens. I start to panic as nothing I am doing is producing water and the fire is getting bigger and quickly melting the bucket creating blobs of blue plastic and ash to be smeared around my deck, still trying to get water out of an hose that is obviously on I begin to worry and think I might need the fire extinguisher soon if I can't get any water out. Finally I see Jonah's water bottle that sprays which he was playing with yesterday, open it and dump it out on the rising flames. Who knew ashes and embers could cause such an inferno!? So I figured out that the hose was frozen solid which is why no water was coming through, but at the time it seems like a bad joke from the universe, right near water yet unable to extinguish a fire before melting an entire bucket and scaring myself plenty. Pretty exciting for a boring sick day!
That's all from the sleepy pregnant mom of three, could those adjectives have anything to do with this incident?? I am going to buy a metal bucket which my mom told me to do ages ago because of the possibility of exactly what happened! Thanks mom :)

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