Boom!

Today I smoked wazoo chicken on the grill which involves cramming a half full (or half empty if you like. The matter of perspective comes up again later.) beer up the ass chasm of a chicken and putting it over fire. My wife bought me a nifty little contraption that holds a standard sized beer can and buttresses the chicken in a stand up position.
Anyway, the coals were turning to ash while I fueled the flames with pecan wood for smoke until eventually I needed to add more charcoal. Which brings me to another cool device my wife bought me - a charcoal chimney that gets fires going with a few pages of newspaper rather than lighter fluid or other stinky combustibles.
So I lit up the chimney again for round two with the style section of last Sunday's paper then went into the backyard. Five minutes later I heard what sounded like a gunshot from around front. I go in the house from the side door and see my wife in the living room who asks me if I just fired a gun. She looks out the front window and then tells me that my chimney has exploded.
The heat caused the cement walk underneath to go off like a bomb - even leaving a crater behind. Burning hot coals scattered for maybe a ten foot radius. My leather gloves caught a shrapnel of charcoal burning the back of a hand completely out. The grid separating the paper from the coals in the chimney was blown out and broken in half. We dumped water on the coals and then sprayed the whole area down with the hose just to be on the safe side.

It's a strange thing to look at an incident like your sidewalk blowing up and consider yourself lucky --- no one was standing next to the damn thing when it went off; the lawn didn't catch fire; the house didn't catch fire; it didn't even ruin the wazoo chicken in the smoker next to ground zero...
Still, I'd rather have the kind of luck that didn't involve constantly saying to myself, "Goddamn.... that could have been so much worse...."
I guess I'll take what I can get.