Crisis In The Kitchen

Those projects that you keep putting off until they become crisis…

I woke up one glorious spring morning on a Saturday ready to tackle two pages of projects (lucky if I got two things done) to find strange noises in the stovepipe of the wood/propane stove. It is illegal to use the wood side, if the propane side is active with these contraptions, so I had been contemplating (for several months – you just can’t rush into some of these projects – it takes careful planning and copious quantities of beer to examine every possible result of an action) relocating the propane piping in order to move the stove back against the wall to allow more room for passage.

Then I heard scraping from inside the pipe and naturally assumed “mouse”. As I listened closer the critter sounded bigger and louder in its frustrations to get back up the pipe. So I thought “squirrel”. But the scratching and vocals were not either. Then I realized it’s a damn bird! Crap!

I started to block off the kitchen from the living room, in case when I removed the piping I can’t get the bird outside before it started to flit around inside. I blocked the back door and screen door open, put on all my safety equipment gear - head, body and gloves (Yah, I watched “The Birds” movie), got some blocks of wood to hopefully cover both ends of the pipe as I gently removed it from the stove and the permanent pipe and, lo and behold, I managed to get 6 feet of pipe outside when a starling popped out and took off without any obvious injuries. WHEW!

This little crisis predicated that I spend the next couple of hours moving the stove all the way out to check the condition of the floor underneath it. GAG! I’ll spare you readers the details but I’ll just state that there was a whole unique ecosystem under there. Mr. Clean and I worked our elbows raw cleaning up under there.

So much for replacing the rotting deck that day. But that’s another story.