Burnin' down the yard...

Two points if you heard Talking Heads in your head when you read the post title. Negative two points if you don't even know what I'm talking about.

Today the weather was perfect, I finally got some help around here, and I almost set our entire yard on fire; in that order. I will now tell you about all three; in reverse order. I've been sending Georgie to 'the bonfire', which is what we call the fire ring in the back yard, to dispose of scrap cuts and junk pieces since January. The pile of spent wood spilled the banks of the fire ring months ago. For a time, I was using a piece of old plywood to ramp wheelbarrows full of miniature wood chunks further up the mountain (which, I'm realizing after the fact should have been dubbed Mt. Woodmore... dangit), allowing the dumped loads to pile higher and higher. It was so nice out today, and we had accrued such a lovely mountain of bone-dry lumber that we thought, "why not have some friends over for a cookout and burn this mother down!?". So we did. Both.

Being perfect hosts, we invited a guest to manage the task of dousing the woodpile with lighter fluid. "Are you sure?... The whole bottle?", she repeated more than once. "Yeah! Hose that baby down! Way down in there!", I replied, more than once as I manned the grill from a distance. She sprinkled about half of the 32 ounce bottle around the periphery of Mt. Woodmore before I struck the first (and only) match. Dissatisfied with the results (or lack thereof), I quickly unloaded the rest of the bottle on the growing flames, way down in there. Mission accomplished. In the span of approximately 2 seconds, the entire pile was engulfed in a raging torrent of flames, 8 feet wide, 10 feet high and 20 feet long. I say long because a stiff breeze had kicked up, sending the fire on a more or less horizontal trajectory; directly into the railroad-tie-turned-bench, propped atop a couple old firewood stumps several feet away. "Welp, the bench is on fire...", someone remarked about 45 seconds in. "Oh yeah, it's burning the grass now", came another. "Is it supposed to be doing that?", probably passed more than a few lips by the time I arrived with our piddly-pressured garden hose to wet the affected areas.

All the guys took turns on "hose duty" until the fire had burned itself down to a massive heap of glowing coals; so hot, I had to duct tape everyone's marshmallow roasting sticks to the ends of long wood-strips I had laying around to make 10-foot-long mega-roasters (as they came to be known around the fire).

Earlier in the day, I had a dude out here helping me. It was great. I got my guy going on the fence panels, while I started the coop. I should have done this a long time ago. Just having the option of saying, "hey man, can you come hold this up for a second?", made such a huge, huge difference. Now I've got walls going up on a coop and a stack of fence panels piling up, I couldn't be any happier. We even had lunch on the front steps, in the perfect weather. There.

I'm explaining how everything goes together on the fence-panel-making-jig I rigged up.

Then I went and did a bunch of this...

while he did a bunch of that...

and cranked out a bunch these...

while I did some of this...

then we had lunch (not a wimpy close-up of what I had for lunch today, gag me). Yes that is Frank's Red Hot Sauce, and I do put it on everything...

then these people came over for a cookout...

then I set the whole yard on fire...

but it was cool, I had it covered...

it all turned out alright.

The End.

-F.W.

P.S., Tomorrow, another special guest and maybe the first real Mt. Airy coop pics? Maybe.