It's alive! (unlike most of Ted's patients)

So, these last two days have had the coldest two evenings so far for which I have had a fire.
As the stove warms up, you can tell how hot the stove is getting do its voice. While warming, the stove tink-tink-tinks rather quickly. As it cools, the tinks are a slightly lower pitch, and occur less quickly. This is how I determine when to load in more wood, even if the outdoor heater is full of flame, because I don't want to have to react to the fire, I want it to do my bidding.
Last night I was drinking some beer, watching the first season of Northern Exposure, and generally trying to heat the outside when the urge hit. No, not to masturbate, but to drop the kids off at the pool. From the pain that struck, it was going to be less of a gentle wave good-bye than it was going to be an evacuation of everything from my neck to my belly button.
Due to the fact that there are some things even I won't do from my back porch, inside I went to begin my calisthenic movement (didn't Brahms compose that?). Twenty minutes later, I returned to the porch to find the fire almost out. I threw a couple of smaller pieces of ash in to get the flame up and prepare the stove for serious flamage. One piece rolled off to the right side and caught fire almost immediately. I went to the fridge to re-beer, and from inside the kitchen I heard a loud TUNK, followed a couple seconds later by TUNK-TUNK. Holy shit, what the fuck?
It turns out that the stove, while heating on one side, was still cooling on the other, and the temperature change had caused the stove to expand on one side, but contract on the other, and the stove shifted, or "walked" to the right.
"Oh shit! I have to move it back or it will separate from the flue!"

I knelt down and grabbed the legs of the stove in order to drag it back to the original spot. Did you know that even the legs of the stove get pretty hot?
You do now, and so do my missing fingerprints.