Bad Luck

If I didn't have bad luck I would have no luck at all. Really. To set the stage for the latest in the follies of Cat's life, you have to know a couple of things. First, I live on top of a very windy hill. Two, we heat our home (and our hot water) with an outdoor wood stove. Three, I bring home all the burnable garbage from the clinic where I work (why put it in a landfill, when I can recycle it into heat and hot water?). Four, I am married to Ruffel. So, today it is very windy, I bring home the burnable garbage from work (it is a big garbage bag, industrial sized bag to be exact), it is effing freezing so the wood stove is going. I go to the wood stove, open the door and put some of the boxes in from the garbage bag, but there is not enough room in the stove to put all the garbage in so I set the bag a respectable distance from the wood stove and close the door. To keep the bag from blowing away I place a couple of pieces of wood on top of it. I go in the house and have a nice visit with my daughter-in-law and grandson. We are having tea and catching up on all the news of town. I give my grandson a haircut and we are having a grand time. I see a tractor roaring up the lane way and pick up Hayden so he can see it coming up the lane . It is Ruffel. I then see Ruffel a couple of minutes later walking with grim determination to the front door, I think to myself, mister happy is coming in. Wrong. He was not happy at all. While I was having tea and a visit the garbage that was sitting in front of the wood stove had caught fire, so did some of the wood pile that was laying there too... oh, and Ruffel's chainsaw . Ronald (Ruffel's brother) was out there with the fire extinguisher and a bucket of water madly trying to put out the blaze. Now, in my defence, I did not see any smoke, or hear any yelling for help, but, then again with the tornado like winds up here, I would neither have heard or seen anything, plus I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on outside when I am inside and the wind is so loud it is like a train is going by the front window all the time. Also in my defence, there were two vehicles that were in and out of here within a 40 minute time frame... why didn't they see the fire? Maybe one of them threw a cigarette butt out their window and the fire had nothing to do with me. All I can think of is that when I had the door of the stove open a spark must have jumped out and hid in the pile of bark etc that is all around the stove, then when I was in having tea it jumped to the bag of burnable garbage. So, to Ruffel, sorry about the chainsaw, I didn't do it on purpose (if I did it at all) and I would suggest parking your truck a little further away rather than in front of the stove... just think it could have been a lot worse.
On fire for you baby...
extinguishabley yours,
Cat x