Happy Thanksgiving

That the 1000th entry here falls on Thanksgiving is accidental but I think its cool nonetheless.

The subject was fire. Here’s my CrabAppleLane fire story. File this in the category of Man, That Was Stupid.

When we bought these five acres in Bush 17 years ago, what would become CrabAppleLane was just a red clay and gravel road and it ended right where our property began. The developers, if you call them that, had pushed all of the trees and dirt and what-have-you from the road construction into a pile up onto the un-bought property. Said un-bought property turned out to someday be ours. The pile was about 20 feet high and 50 feet in diameter and it had been there a while. Vines and weeds were growing in it. Someone suggested I should burn it. Born and raised in the city, I never burned anything. My experience with burning ended with a lighter fluid experiment on my bedroom windowsill that a neighbor saw and put a stop to. That’s a story for another day. My only other experience was watching Dad pour gasoline on ant piles and burning them. I went out and bought ten gallons of gasoline. I walked around this gargantuan pile liberally dousing it with gasoline all the way around as high up as I could get it, which was pretty high. When I had emptied both 5-gal cans, I set them down in a “safe” place about 10 feet away from the pile. The gasoline, which has been on the pile for a couple of minutes by this time, was fuming pretty good. Gasoline fumes distort/react with the air (No scientist here) and that phenomenon was going pretty good. That should have tipped me off that this was a bad idea but it didn’t. My stupidity is formidable. The idea was to light a match and throw it onto the pile. Standing about 5 feet from the pile, I pick up the kitchen matches and with the striker in my left hand and the match in my right, I proceed to light the match. As soon as that match touched the striker (All it needed from that close was a spark), there was a blinding light, a heat and shock wave, and a large whoosh-like noise. My eyebrows were burnt off, the hair on my arms was burnt off, and my hair was on fire but I managed to get that out before it did any serious damage. I was lucky.

The flames shot into the air and by the time I had escaped to a safer distance, made sure I was still in one piece, and had a look, the top of the flames were at tree level and remember this thing is about 50 feet or so in diameter. We had had the property cleared with a bush hog and the only standing trees we had then were tall so the flames were at least 50 feet high. Then 40, 30, 20, 10, 5, and then just a few embers. This entire adventure lasted about a minute. The fire was out. I risked life and limb AND didn’t get the job done.

Quote of the Day

A silver dawn steals over the docks
A truck with no wheels up on the cinder blocks
Men with no dreams around a fire in a drum
Scrap metal schemes rusted over and done

Mark Knopfler, Silvertown Blues

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "How many people were killed by the Black Ops brought in after the storm to eliminate the cities growing "hotspots"? And where were their bodies brought afterward?"

I’ve heard various things like this, too. Rumors were and are rampant and I don’t know what to make of a lot of this stuff. -Rob