The Justinator vs. The Fireplace

The night was cold and dark and............dark. So begins the tale of Justin vs. the Moseley's fireplace. It had been a wonderful day; I slept late, hung out with Jason Cawthon during the afternoon, ate a little bit of pizza for supper. We even went to the Kroger a few miles down the road to get some much needed Dr Pepper and another frozen pizza. Everything was going great! I had my Dr Pepper:D, we had more food, the Moseley's had Behind Enemy Lines and Jason had his laptop to watch the DVD on. Then those fateful words came out of my mouth: "It's pretty cold.....could we build a fire in your fireplace?:D:D:D" (As a side note, their house is so big that they rarely turn the heat on and it gets rather cold) . I was given the ok and the location of dry wood, so we headed outside into the night to get the wood. We got the wood onto the porch, loaded up the fireplace, and got the gas going (the gas is used as a starter).

Everything was going just dandy. I was sipping my Dr Pepper, watching a good movie, curled up by the fire. Then I noticed that the smell of smoke was a little more strong than it should be. I turned my head and watched as the smoke would come up from the logs and just hang out right above the logs then ease its way out into the room. I looked up and ooooooooh boy, look at all the smoke! Asa's wife came in for about the third time to check on the fire and was met with a wall of smoke. She then said, "I thought the smoke was smelling a little stronger than it should be." Turns out, she didn't open the flu (or however you spell it) enough to effectively suck the smoke out through the chimney. After opening the back door, turning on the attic fan, and putting towels at the crack of the children's doors (so as not to scare them into thinking there was an actual "fire fire"), the problem was fixed and we went back to our movie. But was that the end of my troubles? Oh no, of course not!

I was minding my own business watching the movie and I turned to check on the fire and noticed that one of the logs needed to be turned over. Well, to do that I had to roll one log up on top of another log and hold it still with the poker while I turned the log in question over with the tongs. Well, before I knew it the log I had rolled up onto the top of the second log came barreling out of the fireplace and bit me square on me leg. Of course, the thing had to spit sparks at me, so Jason and I quickly put out the five or six sparks that found their way into the *cough* white *cough* carpet. Then the fun part was figuring out how to get a glowing log back into the fireplace touching it as little as possible, but touching it with enough force to get it back in there and it not come barreling back out. The bright idea of using oven mitts crossed one of our minds, so we put that to good use and there wasn't anything that a little whiteout on the carpet, bleach on the oven mitts, and a slap on the back amidst howls of laughter couldn't fix.