A Fire Outside

This post is bigger than the ratio of George Lucas’ movie writing skill to the success of his movies. If this is your first time on this blog, go away, we don’t want you here. Go see Morris. He wants you. Probably sexually…
I almost burned my town down yesterday.

It began with a simple yard burning, pool emptying, pump working, guck cleaning race against time to make my house and yard presentable in time for the annual HIKE OF DEATH across Anthony Gap (10 or so miles under the blistering sun).
Anyway, since I’d absolutely refused to do anything alone, my friends Frank and Kyle came and helped me out (or rather, came and did the work. I helped them out. After all, it was their party).
One of the ‘light’ tasks was weed patrol, which, being New Mexico, is about as light as Frank and Kyle’s collective mother (they’re brothers, by the way). So Kyle decided to start circumscribing some areas to ‘control burn.’ In other words, ‘light a fire, get out of the way, and stop it before it burns anything valuable.’

It almost burned my neighbor’s house down. Since it hasn’t rained in this blasted wasted desertland (*rimshot*) in a week, the small weeds caught fire faster than you could say California Condor. But luckily, we contained it before it worked its way too far into our neighbor’s yard.

you’d think we’d learn our lesson, but no. We just kept burning…

A few hours later, well into the night, we were burning in my backyard (for no other reason than because it was fun) when the wind started picking up.

Oh, how I hate the wind.

At first, we didn’t realize how big it was getting, so we just tried to put it out with shovels and our feet. Then, it started going at what was seriously a brisk-walking pace. Frank grabbed the hose and started spraying it down, successfully retarding the spread of the blaze in one direction.

So the fire went the other way. Frank pulled at the hose as hard as he could, trying to get more slack. Instead he got a broken pipe in the face (or he will, when I get finished with him).

I should probably mention now that we have about forty trees in our backyard.

I should also probably mention that the volunteer fire department is approximately one block away.

Back to the story: it seems that the fire was large enough to be seen by every kid in the neighborhood. Also, some people that were just driving by… in the next town over.

The kids, figuring that our frantic screaming, stomping, throwing of dirt, and frantic racing to stop the fire from going into our neighbor’s yard– again– wasn’t what we had planned, decided to come help us out.

And thank Zeus for that. If it weren’t for those kids, most of my neighborhood would be burned down about now. Those kids saved our lives. They appeared within seconds, saved our lives, and when the fire was out they…
they…
they just disappeared.

The fire department did nothing. They came in time to chastize us and joke around with Frank (he’s the captain of the fire department. It was kind of ironic, actually). But, in their defense, they also got there too late (about 10 minutes after the fire started getting out of control).

Needless to say, there’s about an acre of my yard that’s black with soot.. I hope my mom doesn’t notice it.

Oh, and I need a new background, this one’s pissing me off. Anybody have any ideas? I’ll give you a shiny dollar if your idea or picture becomes my blog background. Ideally, the background would be a solid color (or series of similar colors) so that all the text could be legible. Let me know via this new peek-a-boo, new comment notification comment system that I gakked from Jorge. The 5px border around the links, though, is all mine. I like it. It totally beats the ass of what I had earlier what with the overline/underline thing…

This post is bigger than the ratio of George Lucas’ movie writing skill to the success of his movies. If this is your first time on this blog, go away, we don’t want you here. Go see Morris. He wants you. Probably sexually… I almost burned my town down yesterday. It began with a simple…

Comments

  1. Hilarious. According to your next post, I’m not fit to read your blog.

    “If god didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?”

    Kidding,
    Drew