What A Great Day We Had

Yesterday we spent the day cleaning out our shed. We actually started this job while the kids were on Christmas break but actually got around to finishing the job yesterday. While cleaning the shed, my mom, found some old financial records from back in the mid 90's and decided it was time to get rid of them. She asked me if I could burn them... I said sure.

There were several old bricks in the shed that I used to build a barrier around the roughly 3 ft. across fire pit I dug. For safety reasons I had a water hose standing by, a shovel, and the pile of dirt, to throw on the fire, from where I had dug out the pit. Once I got the fire going I started burning mom's papers. Well, one thing led to another and by late afternoon we all has smores running down our chins and arms. That situation then turned into me going to the store to get hotdogs to roast over the open flame. Plus I was getting to burn off some old, dead limbs that had been accumulating in my yard. Not a bad deal. Get some work done and have a great time with the family.

That is until the fire department showed up. Some nosy neighbor called the fire department on us. The guys showed up and were very cool. They saw what we were doing and basically said have a nice evening. That as long as we were cooking... we were fine. Well, mister nosy neighbor didn't think that was good enough and called the fire boys 2 more times. Complained that there was too much in my back yard that could burn and he wanted "that" fire out now!

The fire boys showed up again, irritated, not at me, but at whomever called them. Again they were very cool but told me to hose it out. The thing is, there wasn't even a flame by this time. It was just about burned out.

What really gets me is it's not like we were being irresponsible with the fire. It burned for 8 hours and was never un-attended. It was in the middle of my back yard away from anything that could catch fire. Even the fireman said there was nothing that could catch fire. This was just some jerk imposing his will on me. This persons apparent entitlement to not let me do what I was doing in my own back yard. He could do what he wanted but I couldn't?!

The fireman told me to go to Walmart and get one of those free standing fireplaces, put it in my backyard and start the biggest fire I could. He said the fire would be in an approved fire container and there would be nothing Captain Complainer could do about it. Guess what I'm going to do!