In our last episode of “The Joys of Home Ownership: Dead Creatures Edition” we nearly met our doom when we came face to face with BLACK WIDOWS. And now for yet another adventure!
Roughly a month after moving into my new home, one morning at 6:30 I could hear rustling coming from the kitchen. Having been woken up from a dead slumber, I was freaked out wondering if someone had decided to invite themselves in to check out my great decor without asking me first. I staggered out of bed and very sensibly tugged on some shorts before tip-toeing out to meet my home invaders only to find that there wasn’t anyone there. In fact there wasn’t any noise at all! Perplexed, I went back to bed and not a moment after I got under the covers did I hear that sound again. A desperate, scratchety clawing at metal. I realized after several rounds of me wandering out to the kitchen only to find the sound had stopped and going back to bed only to hear it again etc… that the sound was a bird, stuck in the exhaust vent for my hot water heater.
Now it will help you to understand that as my home is 100 years old this year, it has a lot of “character” otherwise known as “an endless list of stuff that I just have to make peace with till I can renovate”. My water heater sits in the corner of my kitchen, keeping my range company and showing off all its pipes and vents to the rest of the room. The bird had become stuck in the vent duct and was unable to get out. It was positioned in a generous part of a t-joint that came down out of the ceiling and as I surveyed the scene, still groggy, I realized that I couldn’t address the problem till after work without being very late. I left the kitchen and set about my normal routine.
I picked out my clothes for the day and started the shower. However, my brain hadn’t put together the very fundamental concept that the shower IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO THE WATER HEATER. This means that the heater turns on when someone clueless retard like me uses hot water. When hot, noxious exhaust gasses leave the heater by their designed course, this is generally not a problem UNLESS THERE IS A BIRD IN THE VENT.
At this point in time the bird promptly lost its shit, both figuratively and literally, and started working its way further down the duct till it was just above the heater where, overcome by fumes and heat, it promptly died. I called the office, let them know I was fishing a dead bird out of my water heater and showed up two hours late after disassembling everything cleaning it out and putting it all back together. Oddly enough no one questioned my tardiness, this was one of those things that you just can’t make up.