The Burn Pile

That's right. We have a burn pile. Some people just put their limbs and sticks or whatever out by the side of the road for the city/county to pick up, but not us. What is the fun in that?! We have that service available but we choose to have a burn pile. We live in a somewhat wooded lot which was very grown up with brush and unwanted vines when we bought the lot and built the house. We've cleared out a lot of it, but there's still a good bit of limbs that fall or vines we continue to pull out of trees so instead of hauling all this to the road we have a big pile of limbs that we burn. We can only burn from October through the end of April. We'll get the proper permit online, throw some gas on it, then light her up. Woo-Hoo, What a big time we'll have!!! This past Saturday was one such big day. The boys love it when we burn it. They love throwing random sticks on the burning pile. The burn permit is important because the Neighborhood Nazis will sure call the fire department on you. We've had the fire department show up a couple of times because of one of our neighbors calling them. It's not that we live in the kind of neighborhood where we're the only ones that do this. Everyone around here does this. (ours is the biggest pile of limbs though) Anyway, once we got into a little bit of trouble because of the burn pile. We had only lived here about 9 months and we burned a pile of limbs one Saturday. Well, the next Monday I left with the boys to go to Wal-Mart and I returned to find almost all of my backyard was in flames. It was so much that I had to call the fire department to come out. They had a huge fire truck and a smaller fire truck out here trying to put it out. At the bottom of the burn pile apparently were some smoldering ashes that weren't completely put out. It seems like something always happens when we burn it. This past Saturday I was helping Shane put some more limbs on the fire when he gave me a really thick vine to fold up so that it would be small enough to go in the fire. Gloveless, I broke it up and pushed it together then threw it on the pile. A couple of days later Shane tells me that he thinks that was poison ivy. Of course now my face and pretty much only my face is completely splotchy and itchy from it. Lovely. Sorry, no pictures of that. Fortunately though, Dalton has this week off for a winter break so I probably won't be going anywhere to show off my new itchy face.