Chimney

Our house is very special. No matter what the temperature is outside, it's always ten degrees cooler inside. It's fabulous in the summer, but a nightmare in when it's cold, and our heater just doesn't seem to work very well downstairs. We have a fireplace in our front room, but I've been terrified to use because when it come to our house, if it can go wrong... it will. So we decided we were sick of the cold, and it was time to call a chimney sweep.

It was a beautiful Friday morning when our sweeper arrived, and right away he gave us a lesson on chimneys and how they work. He had diagrams and everything! A half hour later he finally came inside to do the inspection. Good news is, our chimney didn't need to be cleaned, but the bad news is, we could have died if we started a fire. Turns out, the fireplace was rigged for fake logs, but someone did a Mickey Mouse repair so they could burn real logs, and the whole set up was completely rusted because there was no cap on top of our chimney. This is the time that any normal chimney sweep would give us a quote on prices and start working, but our guy decided that this was the perfect time to practice his celebrity impersonations and accents. None of them were very good, and when we was done, he decided to throw some history trivia our way to see how much we know. This went on for at least an hour.

We learned this whole guy's life story in the three hours he was at our house (which was two and a half hours longer than he needed to be there.) He speaks six different languages, he's a member of SAG and AFTRA, he's adopted, and has lots of famous friends. He sang for us, told some jokes, and finally did the repairs on our chimney and fireplace.

When it came time to pay up, I assumed that meant he was done, but then he pulled out a deck of cards and did some terrible card tricks, followed by some equally terrible coin tricks. Did I forget to mention he told us he sometimes performs at the Magic Castle?

That evening we had our very first fire in the fireplace, and it was amazing. We cuddled up on the couch and just stared at the flames talking about life and babies, and it would have been a perfect evening until the dogs started chasing the cats and knocking things over and attacking each other. I love our crazy little family, and I love our fireplace.