It took most of Saturday and Sunday afternoons, but I finally cleared the side yard of waste wood. Everything that is too small for firewood got stacked into a pile in the west pasture for burning next weekend. All the bark, scrap lumber, and a few lucky black walnuts got burned in the firepit near the old apple trees. It was quite a roaring conflagration for awhile. Old pine pallets burn hot and fast. Of note, I tried to burn the tree waste in the west pasture first, but the “InstaStart” fire brick didn’t quite live up to its name. The paper wrapper burned out without ever catching the flammabale brick. Result? No fire. By the time I’d figured it out, I had my hands full with the one in the fire pit. I say, “in the fire pit” as a sort of etomological shorthand for “in/around/near/above” the firepit. I had a lot of junk there.  The fire got so hot it split some of the sedimentary rocks lining the pit (Note to self: find more granitic rocks).  I also had some small creeping grass fires in the dead grass near the firepit. This, despite some rain Saturday afternoon and being early in the season (Note to self: get a longer garden hose.).

Between children’s sporting events, setting things on fire (inadvertently, or not) and starting back in with my jogging, I was booked all weekend. This turned out fine, since GenCon Event Reg was totally overloaded (Note to self: try to act surprised at this). Again. I am already the the King of Generic game tickets, but this year I wanted to get just one actual event slot. Nope. Given the insane overlap between gaming geek (even pen and paper RPGs) and computer  geek, you’d think that they’d have a handle on this sort of thing by now. Not so much. Which is a shame…

because with gas over $3.50/gallon, construction at the convention center and an overall bad economy, they are going to need every last thing they can to get people to show up and spend money this August. For a long time the clueless economists kept saying that “it appears that the economy is going to be able to stand up to $100/barrel oil prices”. For some reason, it never occured to them that the symptoms might take a few months to manifest themselves. This point was brought home to me at Tractor Supply Company the other day when I looked at the prices on their new 3 point hitch compatible equipment. Between increased energy costs and rising demand from China/India, steel prices have shot up in the last year or so. Prices on TSC’s disc harrows went from about $500-$550 to $660. Ouch. I should save money in dollars why? I need to get some Euros or something.

In any case, watch this space for details on how to order your Blue Line Farm Thanksgiving Turkey. Our prices have gone up, too, but less as a result of China and India’s developing economies than the fact that I grossly underpriced them last year. Kudos to those of you who got one on the cheap!