(written on the 10th, 11th, and 18th)
I’m tired, and I don’t want to write. 🙃
I was up late last night, and then I needed to be up early this morning to help Zach do a burn around our old house. Add to that the fact that it was daylight savings time, so we lost an hour, and I was a tired little boy this morning, and I’m much much more tired now after an exhausting day.
We started out doing some basic burns, section by section according to the walking paths that my mom and I had created back in 2020.
It was an absolutely dead still morning, not even a hint of a breeze it seems like, so getting the fire going hot enough to burn up what we wanted to burn up was quite the challenge.
In order to get it to burn hotter, each place that I would light the fire, Zach would come in behind me with his leaf blower. The leaf blower was relatively effective, but only in very confined areas. It’s amazing how just the slightest breeze can really get everything going because it’s all encompassing: it’s not just a narrow wind tunnel of relatively quickly moving air.
But it was effective enough to do what we needed in the beginning.
…
(now it’s the 18th 😅)
So we burned section by section, Stevie coming to help as well.
We took a break around lunch time, Stevie and Risa having invited me to eat lunch with them, so we ate lunch, a Thai dish that Risa made. Good stuff.
Then it was back over to the other side, burning again. Risa helped us this time, so it was the four of us. I got a burn pile going for Risa to be able to bring deadfall to, and then Stevie and Zach and I helped pull up a crap ton of Blackberry vine weeds before turning our attention again to burning different sections of the forest.
Once we got all the sections between the walking paths going, I lit the forested ravine on fire to burn up one side toward the walking paths. So I lit it on fire while Zach came around behind and made sure it didn’t go up the hill toward Stevie’s house yet, as we wanted to control which sections we were burning at each time.
I love living out in the country. 🙃
After getting the side of the ravine burned that our old house is on, we then lit the side of the ravine that Stevie’s house was on.
His side was definitely a lot less structured because the paths that I had made were much less defined on that side and much less taken care of and much more overgrown, and I hadn’t trimmed the forest on that side of the ravine like I had worked so hard to do on our side of the ravine.
Still, we lit it on fire and let it burn, the wind going exactly the direction we needed it to to send it back from the back road where we were cutting the burn off all the way to the other end by the gazebo and Liz’s house.
It was about that time, with us with the hose making sure the fire didn’t make its way towards Stevie’s house itself, and making sure it didn’t burn up his cedar trees, that the county sheriff rolled up.
🙃
I left Stevie and Zach and reset to watch the fire, as I headed over to talk to the sheriff. He had been very very slowly making his way up the driveway from down by the gate, past Liz and Jim’s house, and up to where we were.
The first thing to sheriff said was that we didn’t have a permit for burning, and I was like, wait, yes we do! Zach actually called it in earlier this morning. But the sheriff said there was no record of our having gotten a permit, so I called Zach over, and he showed the sheriff the record of the phone call from earlier in the morning.
Gratefully, the sheriff was actually really cool about it, and it was nice to also be able to say that Zach was a member of the Pea Ridge fire department.
🎉
So I did farewell to the sheriff, as he headed on his way, having let us know that there was fairly significant concern because people could see the fire all the way from Rogers. 🙃
Anyway, it was about that time that the fire was heading into a huge thicket of vines, and figured to end up with a fireball 15 or 20 ft high before it finished burning through the vines, so I was grateful to have the sheriff out of our hair before that happened. One concern, though, was Stevie’s beehives. So we dragged the hose from his place all the way over to the beehives, and I sat there making a wet perimeter around the beehives.
Amazingly, the colony that had died off during the ridiculously cold spell had been replaced by another colony that had decided to move in. 🥳
I’m not sure how the bees found it, but that was quite fortuitous.
Stevie actually picked up one of the beehives, the one that had a colony in it again, and carried it out of the way, well I stayed to keep the fire under control. The fire didn’t indeed explode to probably 15 or 20 ft tall as it ripped through the Blackberry patch, but then it died down as it was getting to where I was, as it had run out of fuel to burn. I still had to work to keep it from catching the beehives on fire and whatnot, but it worked out just fine.
Gratefully, the fire burned all the way from the back road to the field by the gazebo and upper pond.
I only had two real concerns for the burn after we finished the main burn. There were two very dead, very rotten trees that were smoldering, quite high up in one instance, that were right on the leaf line, so I actually stayed walking around the forest until around midnight walking the forest to make sure that the trees didn’t catch the leaf litter on fire on the other side of the back road. The embers falling straight down wouldn’t do it, but if the top of the tree or one of the long limbs came crashing down, I was concerned that it could start the leaf litter on fire on the other side of the forest road.
By the time I’d finished the day, I had walked over 11 miles, 25,000 steps, back and forth and back and forth through the forest doing all the burns.
🚶
From there I headed to the gym, as I was covered in ash and dirt and was quite filthy and wasn’t really wanting to climb into bed like that. 🙃 So I went to the gym, walked on the treadmill a little bit, took a shower, and then headed back to Haven Hill to do one last pass around the forest before crashing for the night.
What else… After breaking a record for the most money I’ve made in a month with JustAnswer in February, I was sent more messages from the JustAnswer people about areas where they said I wasn’t doing good work, and ended up getting demoted, knocked down a pay scale.
ðŸ˜
Needless to say, I was quite unhappy.
I sent off multiple messages expressing my anger and frustration. It boggles my mind to the case they can have the audacity to demote me when they still haven’t fixed massively impactful bugs that keep us from being able to get good reviews.
But whatever…
I let them know that I was on the verge of quitting, and that they’d be losing somebody who is an advocate for customers.
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful that we were able to have such a successful burn today.
- I’m grateful the cop was kind and easy to work with.
- I’m grateful to have a 24-hour gym to take a shower at.
- I’m grateful to have had the energy to walk 25,000 plus steps today.
- I’m grateful that the smoldering trees seem to be unlikely to catch the forest on fire again.
- I’m grateful to be building relationships with Stevie and Risa and Zach.
Success:
- No grudge issues where there could be. 🎉
💪
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 