Fire safety learned the hard way

Now that Thanksgiving is finally over, it's time to start getting ready for Christmas.

If you haven't already started cleaning up and getting ready to put up all the Christmas decorations, most of you will be soon.

I tried doing my annual before-Thanksgiving cleaning a couple of weeks before the holiday -- by cleaning my self-cleaning oven.

Brad and I had been out hunting for a few hours during the morning, one Sunday. After about two hours of looking for birds, we decided to head back to the house and have a little brunch.

I had picked up bacon and eggs, ham, hashbrowns and biscuits for our mid-morning meal.

I set the oven to preheat, got the griddle warming up and put the hashbrowns on. I opened the stove and went to put the biscuits in when I noticed how dirty my oven was getting -- frozen pizzas will do that to an oven.

I cooked the bacon, the ham, the eggs and served it up while we sat and watched some movie on television.

Before I sat down to eat, I decided it was time to clean the oven.

I set it to the cleaning mode, locked the door and sat down to eat our breakfast. I noticed the house was starting to fill with smoke. I guess the stove was dirtier than I thought.

I sat down my breakfast plate and started opening windows and turned on the vent fan over the stove.

I went back to my breakfast and finished it.

"Boy that's smoking worse than it ever has," I told Brad.

We both started watching it little more closely, glancing between it and the movie we were watching.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Brad announced, "We've got fire!"

We both jumped up from our chairs at the same time. I walked into the kitchen and saw flames running up the back of the stove.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the handle on the locked door, yanking the stove to the front door. Brad was in front of me, holding the door open.

Unfortunately, the stove was too wide to get out the front door, we needed to turn it a quarter turn to make it fit. But we were both outside, and the only way we could turn the stove was to grab hold of the back of the flaming stove.

Brad ran to his truck and grabbed a pair of gloves and entered the house through the side door.

We got the stove turned and got it outside, hosing it down and extinguishing the fire.

Once the fire was out, we started doing a little investigating. The wiring in the back of the stove was fried. We checked out the electrical outlet and found a young mouse fried between the electrical terminals.

We're not sure what started the fire, whether it was the mouse or the wiring, but we are sure of one thing. Never again we will put the stove in the self-cleaning mode and leave the house.

The consequences could have been so much worse if we hadn't been home -- we could have lost everything; our dogs, our home -- everything that we hold precious.

So let this be a warning -- if you're thinking about cleaning your stove after fixing that Thanksgiving feast, make sure you stay home and keep an eye on things.

A couple of hours of smelling a little smoke is nothing compared to spending the rest of your life trying to replace a lifetime of memories.