Sometimes the best stories are true. I know for a fact this story is true, I know the person that wrote it, however I'm gonna have to plead the 5th on revealing their identity.

I came across it while cleaning my email folder and figured I could share it with you guys. It's several years old by now, but it's just as good as ever.

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For those of you who might have missed it, this is a charming story of an actual event that actually happened IN MY HOUSE this weekend. Saturday around noon to be exact.

The morale of the story below is: Never set off an incendiary device in your living room.

Now that you're all adequately braced for the events to follow, on with the story.

In my house, our rooms are broken off into a front area of the house, a middle area of the house, and a back area of the house. The front area contains our dining room, kitchen, and utility room and is separated by an open divider from the greatroom, baby's bedroom, master bedroom and bathrooms which make up the middle section of the house. The back area of the house contains our living room, guest bedroom, and my study, which of late is more of a catchall/books/misc storage room.

We have 2 fireplaces in the house, one being in the living room, and the other being in the dining room on the other end of the house. The living room fireplace is larger and tends to accumulate a large number of chimney sweeps, which are highly annoying NOISY, chirping, squawking, jibbering, fluttering, drive-you-crazy type birds. My wife doesn't like chimney sweeps and has tasked me with removing them - a task I took to heart. Blake and Larry can probably truly appreciate the significance and magnitude of what that means better than most, but the rest of you can use your imagination just fine.

I started off small Thursday and Friday night, banging my fist on the fireplace and attempting to yell at the birds and scare them. This caused some of the birds to actually fly DOWN the chimney and cling to the screen covering the front opening of the fireplace, MOCKING ME... so, I did what any deep southern boy would have done. I rummaged around for a while until I had a box of matches, a long pair of pliers (to hold the match), and an aerosol spraycan of highly flammable oil based BBQ grill cleaner. I went back to the fireplace and discovered a few birds were still in residence upon the screen. Without going into details, I managed to persuade the chimney sweeps that my earlier attempts at expressing my displeasure at their racket, had indeed been directed, at THEM. WHOOSH! This means you.

At this point, there were no more birds clinging to my screen, and I believe in fact, that they now realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that I meant business. However, those birds choosing to remain higher up inside the chimney had yet to realize the magnitude of my displeasure.

So ... early Saturday morning my wife and I awoke to the sound of loudly squeaking birds in the chimney and I immediately drove down to the local firework store where I procured several cannisters of "mustard gas" ... industrial sized (huge actually), firework devices that spit out VOLUMES of thick yellow sulfur smoke. Both myself and the guy at the firework store agreed that for the task at hand, these would be ideal, and would jet MASSIVE amounts of sulfur smoke up the chimney, and if I closed both the screen and the glass front walls of the fireplace, the smoke would go up the chimney without going back into the house. I tested one of them in the yard beforehand to see what it would do, and it lived up to it's reputation... it shot smoke like a rocket for a good 10 minutes, thick, yellow, acrid, sulfur smoke. PERFECT!

So I go inside and scope out the chimney. Find a good spot to put the smoke grenade, and proceed to light it and close the front gates. Here, however, is the error of my calculations thusfar. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you place a cannister on the ground, and jet volumes of gas from one end of it, normally the ground is pretty good about absorbing the energy the other end is producing from expelling that gas. However, inside my fireplace, the cannister tipped over, and began whizzing all over the bottom of the fireplace until it finally wedged itself in (as luck would have it) with the gas plume of (thick, yellow, acrid sulfurous) smoke aiming directly at one of the fireplace vents into the living room.

Now then, let me stress something here. This was a closed fireplace and there was no danger of burning the house, there was in fact, no fire. So in those terms, there really wasn't any danger to the house at all, and giving the nature of my house, I had totally sealed off all but the back 3 rooms where the fireplace was anyway.

However, my house is armed with a fairly sophisticated alarm system, and part of the alarm system includes a comprehensive fire and smoke detector system, wired directly into the alarm system, wired directly into a master monitoring company somewhere... so while I knew there was no real problem (other than a couple rooms in the back rapidly having their oxygen replaced with sulfur), my house went into panic mode with flashing lights and klaxons and I was bombarded with calls from both the alarm company and fire departments almost immediately. Meanwhile I'm trying to hold my breath while I run in and out of those rooms in short bursts opening windows, doors, and ripping those *&##ing fire detectors off the walls, wiring and all. My eyes were burning and watering, my lungs were on fire, and the phone is ringing with the alarm company calling to see if all's well.

Fortunately, we have a rainbow vacuum cleaner, and in one heroic effort, I was able to rush in there, get that little bugger set up in the room, and turn it on before careening back outside. All I have to say, over the course of about an hour, that little vacuum cleaner sucked every bit of the sulfur and smoke out of the area and all's well at home now... unfortunately, during the time I'd planned to put a permanent screen over the top of the chimney once the birds were out I was forced to clean and get the house itself back in order, so I wasn't able to seal off the chimney.

Sunday morning, my wife and I awoke to the jibbering of highly annoying birds in the chimney ... and my quest continues. However, I won't be doing that again.

Sounds to me like the smart thing to do would have been to put a permanent screen over the chimney wouldnt take long. Then get the house back in order.
By not doing that you just found yourself back at square one.

I think a nice cozy fire would take care of it quick.

quote:

Never set off an incendiary device in your living room.

Back when dirt was new,I went to Washington D.C. with the elementary schools Crosswalk patrol.
Along the way,one of the crew got hold of a small fireworks rocket.In our Hotel room we opened the window and aimed said rocket towards the opening.Randy lit the fuse and as he turned to run, he knocked it a lil outta kilter.
It took off and hit the wall beside the window.Back towards me it came.It bounced off all four walls in that lil room for what seemed like an Eternity.We were blessed that the bursting Starshell got broke off during its flight around the room.
Smoke was awful,but not as bad as running around the room stomping out little fires the rocket left behind.
We got our asses chewed, but we still got to go to all the monuments and the Smithstonian.

Hehe, good one Poletax.

To the other posters, yeah, I suppose in retrospect just burning a few newspapers or something in the fireplace would have been just as effective, but unless you live with chimney sweeps, it's difficult to fully appreciate the annoyance level they can generate.... an annoyance level that calls for measures above and beyond the mundane.

The toughest part was it took MONTHS for the sulfur smell to fully dissipate from the living room, and everything was coated, and/or permeated with a fine yellow dust

My neighbor gave me a call once and asked if I would come down, she thought there was something in the chimney and it had been there at least 24 hours. Sure enough the was something there ,I could hear it .I was wondering ,a racoon or possum ? So very carefully I opened the ash removal door .It took a while to realize what it was since it was covered with soot.It was a merganser !I carefully grabbed it ,took it outside and threw it up in the air.It flew off and headed for the river none the worse for wear !!!

excuse my ignorance, but what is a merganser and where are they commonly found?

It's a water bird. I think in roughly the same family with ducks and geese.

My wife called me at the local watering hole one Friday eve to tell me that someone was in the house. She could hear noises ( other than the voices she normally hears ) but couldn't really pin down where they were coming from. I rushed home and after a tense tour of the house with a .45 could find nothing.
A little later as I was sitting in my recliner I began to hear things also. Long story told short, it was coming from the fireplace. I opened the glass doors and out flew the nastiest, soot covered wood duck you could ever hope to see. That damn duck was flying through the house, slamming into walls and windows and spreading soot and ashes everywhere. Finally had to club it to death with a broom as it flew by me. Had to have carpets cleaned and wound up having to repaint the den. To this day I still hate wood ducks.

What, you didn't grab the 10 guage?

Didn't have any steel shot.

Back in 1978 I was squirrel hunting with a .36 muzzle loader.

I was sitting in a fence row watching a hickory tree when I started to get a little bored.

Remember the Dan'l Boone films where he runs a trail of black powder from the powder keg, out of the cave say 20' and lights it? The powder fizzles slowly toward the cave giving ol' Dan'l plenty of time to get behind a big rock right?

Well any way I took a stick and made a hole in the ground about the size of a man's thumb, filled 'er with some 3f, tricked a trail of powder about 2' and tried to light 'er off with my cigarette knowing of course that I had plenty of time to lean away from the big poof and flash from perhaps 200grs of black powder, just like ol' Dan'l running for cover in the movies.

Alas the end of my cigarette was not quite hot enough to set 'er off, so I leaned over and gently blew on the end of the cigarette placed @ the end of the trail of powder.

For some odd reason the 2' trail of powder burned signifacantly faster than the stuff ol' Dan'l was using.

When my nostrils (and lungs) cleared of the rotten egg smelling stench, I decided to cut short my little adventure and returned to my car. A look in the mirror revealed that I had hardly any eybrows left.

Whew! LOL ... yeah, gotta be careful with that powder.

I'll bet some of you fellas run with scissors too.

No, but I did work on helicopters.

Hmm. Being careful with black powder eh? Many years ago, when I lived in Nevada, we used to spotlight jack rabbits out in the humungous fiekd that was a grassy area left by a long ago brush fire. It was a nice warm summer night, and me and my buddt diecided to go give the rabbits hell. I'd just bought a new T/C Hawken .50 caliber so I took it along to see how it would do on a rabbit. We ran into the son of one of my co-workers and while we we talking, a rabbit moved into the fringe of the headlights of one of the vehicles. I decided to rey the Hawken on that rabbit and torcher one off. Torched it right. The sparkd from that muzzle loader started a grass fire that took us about ten minutes to put out. Damn fine rifle, that Hawken. Not only killed the rabbit, but started the fire to cook it with.
Paul B.

quote:

Originally posted by Paul B:
Hmm. Being careful with black powder eh? Many years ago, when I lived in Nevada, we used to spotlight jack rabbits out in the humungous fiekd that was a grassy area left by a long ago brush fire. It was a nice warm summer night, and me and my buddt diecided to go give the rabbits hell. I'd just bought a new T/C Hawken .50 caliber so I took it along to see how it would do on a rabbit. We ran into the son of one of my co-workers and while we we talking, a rabbit moved into the fringe of the headlights of one of the vehicles. I decided to rey the Hawken on that rabbit and torcher one off. Torched it right. The sparkd from that muzzle loader started a grass fire that took us about ten minutes to put out. Damn fine rifle, that Hawken. Not only killed the rabbit, but started the fire to cook it with.
Paul B.

Heh, heh. That reminds me of a similar story related to me by a friend. I did see the "aftermath" so I believe it to be true.

"Brownie" was a "motivationaly challenged" sort that liked to drink beer and had a "pud" job working on small engines @ a rural hardware/feed store in Southern Indiana. He didn't make much money but he rented a small house a few miles from work for a "song" and he would sometimes go home @ lunchtime to play or perhaps partake in a few "barley pops".

"Brownie" had aquired a .58 CVA "Big Bore Mountain Rifle" with accessories in some kind of trade. He knew little about muzzleloaders but he was a bit of a collector so, try as I might, I couldn't get him to sell me that rifle @ anything near a resonable price.

Anyway, the way the story goes, "Brownie went home @ lunch, probably had a few "brown bottles" and decided to try out the ol' .58 @ a makeshift target set in the fencerow, using his woodpile as a backstop. After a few rounds (both types) he put the gun away and returned to work.

Not knowing much about muzzleloaders it seems that the patches were used "dry" and had no lube on them whatsoever. Apparently one of these dry patches was smoldering and landed in the dry grass adjacent to the woodpile starting a fire after "Brownie" returned to his job.

Fortunately the house didn't catch fire but the entire stack of wood was burnt.

The strangest thing about the whole deal was that nobody noticed the fire until "Brownie" returned home several hours later to find that several cords of wood were now ashes.

so if the smoke bomb worked well on you, why not try again... this time manufacture some form of stand for the grenade so that it stays in the appropriate position.