Yeah, I don’t deny this claim — come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever denied this claim. I’m one with my strangeness.

Well, I managed to miss another daily blog post, but I swear I had a good excuse. I’d totally forgotten about this huge brush fire out at the golf course (that was a ‘by invitation only’ event ) that was tentatively slated for Tuesday night.

We ended up going to Alex for a brief shopping trip when I got home from work, and by the time we got home (around 9pm), we had something like eight messages on the machine about the fire event. I thought Erik had my cell phone number, but apparently not. Regardless, I gave him a call when we got home. I found out that they’d not yet started the fire and would wait until I got there. So, I pretty much unloaded the car, fed the dogs, and jumped in my pickup to head for the golf course (which is about 20 miles from home). I made it there with plenty of time to spare.

Long story short, several of the invitees (most employees) were camping out on the golf course overnight, so they had a few tables, tents, chairs, and a grill out there. Good times. Oh, yeah, and of course beverages of choice. For the majority of the attendees, this was Mountain Dew, but for a few of us it was a few frosties. 🙂

The fire ended up being a bit of a bust. Don’t get me wrong — there was definitely fire. But it didn’t end up nearly as big as everyone was hoping. Things just didn’t line up right, so the entire brush pile didn’t go up. Based upon what I heard from Erik tonight, there’s still a good sized pile (of smaller brush) left to burn, but the bigger stuff was simply smoldering. We ended up moving our vantage point last night to the area of ‘good fire’ (the part that’s now smoldering). But, it was a good time nonetheless. I think I got home some time around 1:25AM, which is why I didn’t post any pictures or do a blog entry last night.

I got to see two cool things last night, though. Well, unrelated to the fire. We all took some time and went some distance away from the fire (which on a golf course isn’t difficult to do) to watch the space shuttle and space station go flying through the night sky. The event viewing was brief (just a few minutes), but it was really cool to see nonetheless. Additionally, later we saw several satellites in non-geosynchronous orbit fly through the sky.

It’s kinda cool, because things like that I think often are overlooked. It also puts things into a bit of perspective when you think about these fairly large objects orbiting the planet…and the fact they’re but small dots briefly visible in the night sky. Suddenly the major problems in daily life don’t seem all that significant anymore.

Anyway, today was a fairly normal day. I slept in a little bit since I spent the morning around home with Kirstin. That was kinda fun; it’s been a while since I’d done that. I spent the afternoon at work and upon my return home worked on spraying the entire lawn with 2,4-D (LV4) using the new sprayer. Very cool. Got to play around with it; we’ll see how the results turn out.

It’s very easy to use, and I figured I’d try to take advantage of the wind direction this afternoon (NW around 7-12MPH). Tomorrow and Friday are supposed to be winds from the Southernly directions, which is bad. Even though they’re supposed to only be topping out around 7MPH, the direction is what messes things up. We’re pretty well protected (at least around the house and where it matters related to drift) from the northwest, so it was a good time. The sprayer works quite well, so that was cool.

In a perfect world, I’ll have mixed it up and had good enough coverage to not burn out things completely (which is difficult to do with 2,4-D anyway) but still be effective. We’ll see the results in a few days.

In random last-minute news of the day, the basement has really dried up since I removed the screen windows and extra doors. That’s a good thing. Seeing as how we bought two gallons of bleach yesterday, I’m hoping that this weekend will bring the remainder of the basement clean-out. Then the true cleaning can commence…and eventually that sump basin will get installed.

So anyway, until next time…

–MZ