BURN!!!

Success! John set the fire on Friday and we have a pile of ash and rubble now. I never knew how pretty the meadow was on the other side of that huge pile till now. He has several more piles to light but it will need to wait till the wind dies down. Now it's time to dust off the riding mower and start whacking down the grasses that grow in the meadows. From now till mid-October he will be spend all waking hours on the weekends riding his mower. Have a great week. I am off to Paducah this Saturday for the annual quilt show!

NO BURN!

Evidently, there is a limit to the amount of rain you can get and still be able to burn. We reached and exceeded it! John set fire to the burn pile on Sunday and it proceeded to smoke...I mean it SMOKED! There was no great blaze, only a tiny flame and then a huge billow of smoke. It smoked for hours and hours...it was still smoking yesterday! It hasn't rained since Saturday so John was going to try to set fire again today. Fortunately, I am at work and won't see the blaze OR the smoke.

Burn

Well, we've had rain for the last 5 days and the ground is pretty wet. That makes it a perfect day to set fire to the burn pile. You see, folks, we don't use the trash man the same way you city folks do. We throw away the bottles and the plastic but we give the wet garbage to the pigs and we burn the leaves and dead branches and trees. The grass clippings we toss in the compost pile. John and our neighbor set fire to the burn pile a couple of weeks ago. It started out 10 feet high, 10 feet wide and 20 feet long. Not all the pile burned though...one of the tree stumps was still fairly large. John has been working on clearing more of the underbrush in our woods along the road so he can start putting the fencing up. He's been putting all the cleared brush onto the burn pile and the darned thing is huge again. Today is a great day for burning (or so I'm told!) so they will set fire around 9:00 this morning. I'm going to sequester myself in the studio on the other side of the house so I can't see the fire.

January Ice Storm

We had an ice storm of epic proportions in mid-January. Unfortunately, it occurred during a holiday weekend when we had off anyway...no extra time off work! Here are a couple of pictures taken outside our house.

First Post

I was reading an email from my sister-in-law in Arizona and she asked me when I was going to start a blog so they could see what we are doing here in southwest Missouri. Our son has one that I check daily for news of our grandchildren. I never thought about doing one myself. So bear with me while I find my 'blog' feet. More later. And, in the meantime, Welcome, dear friends.