Fire!

Oh yeah - we have achieved fire - not all that hard really when you have a ponderous pile of flammable material drying in the hot sun., to wit:

Bradford pear root and branch, twigs, leaves, sticks, chunks, random shop scrap - how brightly it will burn!

All it took was a bit of scrap paper and voom! 

It didn't take long to burn down to this:

At night it looked like this:

Who brought the marshmallows?

It is still smoking this morning, and I hope, burning out the silver maple stump that the fire pit is built on.

We had a nice sunset, probably due to all the extra smoke I put into the atmosphere:

Nice sunrise this morning, too:

No, wait, that was a couple of days ago, but it is still a good one.

My Mexican sunflowers are blooming - they are a treat this time of year. They are growing next to a white oak tree I transplanted from my old place - they hitched a ride in the root ball and are currently taller than the oak tree. Cool!

It certainly feels like it.

My weekend so far

Friday evening as I was wrapping up the week's work I heard a loud cracking sound - a large branch had snapped off the large Bradford pear tree in my front yard and crashed to the ground. While I would have preferred to prepare my evening meal and retire for the night I decided to spend some time cleaning up the mess - no time like present to git 'er done.

How the broken limb presented:

And from the other side:

I went about my business and when I got home on Saturday I was able to continue sawing the branch into pieces and pruning the smaller twigs off:

Not wanting to run the chainsaw on Sunday I spent the morning using pruning shears to cut the branches into pieces that would fit into my cart. I hauled them back to the burn pile and piled them thusly:

This particular tree is not the usual cultivar of Bradford pear - for one thing, it produces thousands of tiny fruit:

Or maybe it is millions. Who knows? Another clue is that it is huge - that is the main group of trunks and the saw in the foreground has a 3' long bar:

My blackberry lilies were almost a complete failure this year - first it was too dry, then we had a prolonged rainy spell, then they fell over, but they produced seeds anyway:

As I wrote earlier my efforts to propagate them were not successful, but one new plant sprouted off of the underground bulb system, so maybe I will be bold and try to transplant that one. Fortune favors the bold, right?

There is still a ton of Bradford pear wood to move but I received a call from a friend and what do you know - I and my dog were invited on walkies, our first since June. So forget about hauling wood, let's go for a walk on a cool, overcast afternoon. During our jaunt through familiar but subtly changed areas I saw some flars:

M R purdy.

Later, after consuming mass quantities I shall resume my mighty labors. Much remains to be done just to catch up with where I was before the limb fell.

Rumor has it that TS Florence is reforming and heading back. I have no idea. But there is always a song, regardless of the possibilities.

Leon!