My Personal Darwin Awards

For the next few blogs, I hope to share with you "My personal Darwin Awards" There are several stupid things I've done in my life that some would say that I had "A Blond moment".


Fire-Fighter Uniform:

Kristie was six years old and Nick was only just 4 months old. It was a cold mid-February evening around 9:00 pm and I was working graveyard shift and was getting ready for work that night. I was in the middle of a shower when I heard a loud scream coming from the kitchen followed by the electricity shutting off. I jumped out of the shower in a panic and headed down the dark hall. I could see flames coming from the kitchen. See my wife had supposedly put some baby bottle nipples on the stove to boil. Well, she turned on the wrong burner. Instead of the pot with the nipples, she accidentally turned on the burner to the pot that we use to cook French fries in. This pot of grease always has a lid on it when not in use. Needless to say, it didn’t take very long for this to go up in flames.
With our kitchen in flames, I instructed my wife to take the kids out to my truck and wait for me. I grabbed the first blanket I could find to smother the fire, (which was Tammie’s best and favorite blanket), but I was in a panic to get this fire out and wasn’t paying any attention to anything else except the fire. Without hesitation, I picked up the flaming pot and move it to the floor. I didn’t feel a thing at the time, but noticed I had severe burns on my hands later. It’s a wonder I didn’t pass out from smoke inhalation. God was definitely breathing for me that day. After I got the fire under control, I headed for the door to go outside. I opened the door, and suddenly felt a cold brisk wind hit my body. Once my brain nerves figured out what was wrong and shared the data with me, I realized that I was standing butt naked at my front door. I knew that it was just a matter of time before I passed out from the smoke inhalation, but there was no way I was going to be on the late night news in this form. So, coughing hysterically, I crawled to my bedroom and grabbed some warm ups from my chest of drawers and crawled outside to safety.
Now, here comes the time of stupidity. I bet we sat in my truck over an hour waiting for the fire department to show up, the whole time thinking, “This Fire Department sure is slow.” Then it suddenly occurred to me, “maybe, just maybe, if the fire department knew about the fire, then they might just show up.”