hello and welcome to coffee with lyman and here's to you a nice healthy husky brew of coffee
well thought i'd tell you a story now the last um coffee with lyman was about my father
and a gas leak under our mobile home and how he lit up a match a cigarette lighter and poof
exploded some uh lpg well anyway now the stories turned around on me doing something very stupid so
this was back in the 1970s i'd say it'd be the late 70s and what had happened was
i was living alone i went out did some drinking came home late so i got home and i was hungry
i thought what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a couple of what we call seven bone steaks
now that's a piece of pork cut about that thick
and uh they're just delicious they're so delicious and
they're real cheap they're easy to cook you know all the good things about them
so i decided i was gonna make a couple of those eat them go to sleep so what do i do i go home
excuse me i go home and i pull out two of them pull them out they're frozen
i turn the broiler on now if you don't know what a broiler is think of a conventional stove
in a home on top you've probably got four burners gas burners where you can boil water cook soup
whatever on top of the stove the whole thing is called a stove excuse me you got the range
on top you got your big old oven right under that where you would bake bread or whatever and in some
of the stoves in the very bottom there's a drawer you can pull out and that's called a broiler well
i was going to broil these two pieces of pork now what i did was turn the broiler on
that basically puts that your biggest flame of the oven is on right the top high setting
and it's broil put the two pieces of meat in there slid the drawer shut and i knew i had to wait
so many minutes before i would flip them over and then a few more minutes they'd be ready to eat
well me being the drunken guy i was at that moment decided i would sit down in my nice big
comfy recliner now it was late i was drunk and i fell asleep like could you be stupider than that
so what happened was i woke up and i was completely consumed in smoke the very very thick
smoke but it was halfway up the walls halfway not not right down to the floor so i actually no
i wasn't in my recliner i was in my bed i wouldn't lay down on top of the covers of my bed
so it was a one-floor home so i got up and when i stood up it was like it was 120 degrees in the
room so i walked it was a small place so i just walked from the bedroom quickly into the kitchen
and turned off the stove and smoke smoke everywhere and i turned that off
and it was on fire though i when i pulled the drawer open it was actually
a flame in there the fat on the pork it caught on fire and when i pull that drawer open you know
that's down by the floor real low the flame shot up into the ceiling and i quick shut the drawer
i thought oh man what am i going to do pull the drawer open a little the flames come up
well i can't put the fire out without opening the drawer and i can't open the drawer because
the flames are bouncing all over so i did another astoundingly stupid thing
on my kitchen counter i had a big old can that would hold five pounds of plain old
white powdery flour and that stuff's combustible well again me being me i thought maybe if i pull
the drawer open real fast i knew i couldn't put water that would spread the fire i could dump that
whole thing upside down on top of that broiler uh so fast that it wouldn't have time to go
explode it just put the fire out that's what i did and it worked the fire was out okay so now i
got five pounds of flour all over the stove and on the broiler and all over the floor but the fire is
out and of course my my meal was shot so i look around and you know i have the doors open open
the windows get the smoke out and uh i sobered up really fast then i had been raising canaries
you know canaries are typically a little yellow bird about the size of a sparrow and they sing
right well i wanted to raise them so i had a couple cages in my home with canaries in them
one of the canaries was a snow white color snow white and after i was done i was looking at the
canary see if they're all right because you know they could have died of smoke inhalation
they're rather fragile this canary had on its beak where it's little holes are to breathe
through its nostrils it actually had black all around there from the smoke going in and out
oh i felt bad about that but the bird was okay i went in the bathroom a little later
and i looked at myself in the mirror and i was the same way i had black all down in here
from me breathing in the smoke i could have so easily killed myself oh my god so anyway
lesson learned right something i already knew but now it was enforced reinforced so i swore
i would never ever do that again i'm never going to cook and lay down and fall asleep so
another week or two later i come home same scenario put the put the meat in the broiler
i'm drunk i don't lay down in bed i sit down in my uh recliner and i fall asleep in the living room
same thing happens i wake up but this time when i wake up there was no smoke and the house was
extremely hot and i woke up and i looked around i couldn't figure out what they were looked like
little black spiders everywhere floating in the air just floating around everywhere what is it
and then i realized oh my god this time the smoke had come and gone away and it gotten so
thick that was what was left in the air for some little while after that which is when i woke up
there was this black soot floating around in there oh my god so i hurry up i realize what
happened and go look at the kitchen stove there was no fire the fire was gone what had happened
though it had gotten so hot that the door on the front of the the uh broiler had actually warped
oh i couldn't believe it i pulled open the drawer and i looked it down at pork shoulder steaks
and what i had were little black round balls a little smaller than a marbles and they were
bouncing all by themselves on that tray which was you know a tray and had tin foil on top of it so
i had two bones laying there totally blackened and the meat had burned so bad that it actually
became little black balls and they were bouncing because they were so hot and the doors warped
again so it you know stupid guy oh my god i actually slept through the fire i just
uh man you gotta think like i guess somebody up there looks after me so that is how stupid i am
i learned the lesson the first time one that i shouldn't have had to learn because common sense
would tell you not to do it turned right around and did it again a week or two later worse then
i actually stuck to the lesson i learned never did that again and lo and behold i'm still alive
yeah that was back like 40 40 45 years ago among the many stupid things i've done well
it was nice talking to you i hope you enjoyed my ridiculous situation that i told you about
and i look forward to seeing you again the next time we have coffee together goodbye for now