We were starting high school and my friend Harold had asked me to join him in his basement to watch an experiment. He often invented fun stuff in his little lab and sometimes the results were real knee slappers.

He’d set up shop in the far northwest corner of the basement where nobody ever goes. I was thrashing through cobwebs when he told me what he intended to do. Instead of turning and running like any sane person would have done, I stuck with him while he finished his preparations.

He had me hunker down behind a bunch of dusty old boxes. “Watch this,” he said.

Before I had time to think about what he was doing, he struck a match and lit a fuse he had hanging out of the foundation.

“What are you doing?” I screamed.

“Ten.” he said.

“You’re not really going to blow that thing up,” I said.

“Nine.”

“Come on, Harold, you’ve set your little experiment under the sill plate of your own house.”

“Eight.”

“Harold, this isn’t funny. You could blast a hole in your house.”

“Seven.”

Harold had always been a nerd, but where he got the plans for his bomb, his little bomb as he called it, I had no idea.

“Six.”

“What are you doing?”

“It’s called an experiment. Five”

“An EXPERIMENT! You’re gonna blow up your house.”

“Just a little mixture of chemicals. Four.”

“Where’d you get the recipe?”

“Did it in science. Three.”

I could see he’d timed his fuse perfectly.”

“In the open, it just fizzles a little. Two.”

“But this is an enclosed space.”

“One.”

He paused.

“Zero,” I said.

Smoke started pouring out of the little hole in the foundation. I ducked behind the boxes and in a moment I heard an explosion and a spattering of stuff, probably concrete chunks, against the boxes.

Harold jumped up and yelled. “It worked! It worked!”

Well, he didn’t blow up the house. He did make a hole in the foundation and burn a little section of the sill plate. His dad made him do the repairs–with supervision, of course.