Not His "A" Game

Last night was a calamity of errors for my well intended husband. I debated blogging about them and decided the evening was too funny not to share.

I mentioned somewhere in a previous post that we're frog sitting for friends who are on vacation. Unfortunately, this means feeding them live crickets every few days! We only do this for great friends! Last night Brad fed the frogs while the girls watched on excitedly. Brad commented several times that he thought most of the crickets in the box were dead. Later that evening I heard the crickets chirping. I had heard them a few times earlier in the week, but they seemed especially loud and active. I teased Brad about how loud his dead crickets were tonight!

A few hours later I went to set a glass in the kitchen sink and was startled by a cricket. I yelled for Brad and we discovered that he had failed to seal the cricket box tightly and they were escaping!!! I would like to say I was calm, but I freaked out at the thought of crickets in my cupboards! I think Brad caught about 7, and insisted that was all that got out, yeah, right...they were all dead, too! I guess they were so loud earlier in the evening because they were celebrating their great escape! The frogs were elated as they got to eat about 3 times their normal dinner portion!

Later that night Brad decided to build a fire in the fireplace in our bedroom. We have 3 fireplaces in this house but we've yet to use any of them. I think he was inspired since he spent Sunday afternoon chopping up some firewood. He thought he had the flue open...but as our room quickly filled with smoke he learned that the flue obviously wasn't opening like he had thought. He worked on it for a few minutes without success while the fire grew and the smoke started to fill the room. I shut our bedroom door to contain the smoke and opened all of our windows. I also ran to the bathroom and started filling a large glass with water to douse the fire.

So instead of a cozy fire warming our bedroom in our big stone fireplace, we sat with our eyes burning from the smoke and shivering in our smoke scented comforter with the windows open and fans blowing until about midnight while we waited for the room to be non toxic! Today I had to wash the comforter on our bed and our linens, light every candle I own (good thing I got a few new ones!) and keep the windows open despite the cold weather in attempts to air out the camp fire scent permeating our master bedroom. I'm afraid we're going to be like cigarette smokers who can't even smell their own scent...we'll show up at church and friends will ask us if we just came from a camp fire!