Guest Writer

My husband posted a funny story on Facebook and I thought I would share it here as well.
Enjoy.

Starlings and the Dryer Vent Love Shack - or - Bye, Bye, Birdies... (Your choice, but personally I like the first one.)

Yesterday upon arriving home from my dungeon of a dead end job my girls said, "there's something making weird noises in the laundry room." The Dad Man (that's me) springs into action. I walked into the laundry room expecting nothing and thinking that they were hearing things. To my surprise I did hear a faint scratching in the vent. I left Casey in the laundry room with instructions to turn on the dryer on my command. I went outside and raised up the little door on the dryer exhaust vent to told her to turn on the dryer. Immediately I was plastered in the face with a wad of freshly cut grass. Beautiful... at least I have learned to keep my mouth closed while looking up! After wiping all the grass off my face, blowing the dirt of my glasses, and reminding myself to control my tongue I stomped back inside to the laundry room. After a brief moment of dragging all the laundry room stuff into the hall I wrestled with the dryer. It lost, and inside of five minutes I was headed back out the door with the dryer vent hose in hand. Back inside two little girls were pouting and saying, "what about the baby birds Dad?" I stomped my way across the back yard and out the back gate all the while muttering to myself, "no darn Starling nest is gonna cause my house to catch on fire no matter what!" (Before everyone gets fired up about baby birds... Starlings were not native to North American and were imported by an European immigrant. I'm not a fan of non-native avian species.) (OK, everyone breath now and stop looking up the number to PETA.) I proceeded to dump the rest of the grass, that did not land smack in my face, out of the vent hose. To my girls delight, no babies and no eggs. Apparently my sacred dryer vent was just a tunnel of love at that point. Well, one thing lead to another and I ended up getting everything back together. All was well and the Love Shack was closed.

Yea, right... My dear wife of almost 17 years calls me at 7:15am. She had been bounced out of bed at 6:15am to a horrendous noise. Needless to say no one at my house was singing "Kum-ba-Ya" early this morning. The Love Shack was open and the band was rockin'. Apparently this one went up to 11! (Shameless Spinal Tap reference.) She ran Mr. and Mrs. Starling out of the vent pipe and then proceeded to tape the little flappy door shut with electrical tape. (Yup, that's my girl. She sure showed those amorous avians.)

Yet, The Dad Man's job is never done... So again, I spring into action. With 1/2" expanded metal, a plasma cutter, two vise grip clamps, a piece of angle iron, two different hammers, a wire feed welder, and a little galvanizing spray paint the permanent closure sign was posted on the front door of the Love Shack.

Now we can sing "Kum-ba-Ya". Mr. & Mrs. Starling were pretty torqued, but I'm sure that found someone else's dryer vent. I'm feeling good that my drier vent hose won't be catching on fire anytime soon. The girls were glad that, "no animals were harmed in the making of this story". And hopefully my Mrs. will get to sleep a little longer in the morning.