I’ve had quite a few good luck moments in my life. But one that I remember once in a while still strikes me as really fortunate.
We bought our property with a really old house on it, that was actually made from crate wood with stencils on it. I discovered this when I tore it down. I knew it was really bad, but it served its purpose for almost 5 years. We lived in it while we were building a house next-door with our own hands. When I say next door, I mean 2 feet away or 3 feet maybe. The rent we saved by living in that old house over that five years paid for the property.
Anyway, one afternoon my wife and kids are outside with me. She was cooking something in the pressure cooker and it was on low heat just enough to build up the steam pressure, and was outside for some reason for a short period of time with the kids and me . We heard this boom sound. Not an explosion but just a sound kind of like thunder maybe but very short. It came from in the house.
We went in to see what that was about, and there was a circular hole in the drywall ceiling above the stove, and the whole kitchen ceiling and walls were covered with whatever was being pressure cooked! The top of the pressure cooker blew off!
I checked out the pressure cooker and the lid to see if I could figure out why, since it was not broken and all the tabs which hold the lid in place on the base were intact.
Turns out it was a design flaw in the pressure cooker itself. When the base handle and lid handle were aligned, the top was securely attached to the bottom. But there was nothing to prevent the top handle from going past the base handle, except the compression on the gasket. As the gasket became thinner with use, my wife just continued to push the handles as needed to tighten up the lid. But in doing so less and less of the interlocking tabs were contacting each other. That day they were probably just overlapping by a hair.
She could have easily been in the kitchen when that happened and scarred for life or worse. The kids could’ve been in the kitchen too.
I consider this one of my most lucky lifetime events.
I bet we all have some…
We bought our property with a really old house on it, that was actually made from crate wood with stencils on it. I discovered this when I tore it down. I knew it was really bad, but it served its purpose for almost 5 years. We lived in it while we were building a house next-door with our own hands. When I say next door, I mean 2 feet away or 3 feet maybe. The rent we saved by living in that old house over that five years paid for the property.
Anyway, one afternoon my wife and kids are outside with me. She was cooking something in the pressure cooker and it was on low heat just enough to build up the steam pressure, and was outside for some reason for a short period of time with the kids and me . We heard this boom sound. Not an explosion but just a sound kind of like thunder maybe but very short. It came from in the house.
We went in to see what that was about, and there was a circular hole in the drywall ceiling above the stove, and the whole kitchen ceiling and walls were covered with whatever was being pressure cooked! The top of the pressure cooker blew off!
I checked out the pressure cooker and the lid to see if I could figure out why, since it was not broken and all the tabs which hold the lid in place on the base were intact.
Turns out it was a design flaw in the pressure cooker itself. When the base handle and lid handle were aligned, the top was securely attached to the bottom. But there was nothing to prevent the top handle from going past the base handle, except the compression on the gasket. As the gasket became thinner with use, my wife just continued to push the handles as needed to tighten up the lid. But in doing so less and less of the interlocking tabs were contacting each other. That day they were probably just overlapping by a hair.
She could have easily been in the kitchen when that happened and scarred for life or worse. The kids could’ve been in the kitchen too.
I consider this one of my most lucky lifetime events.
I bet we all have some…
