Burnin' Down The House!

In all the chaos of last week, I forgot to post about how we nearly burned down the neighborhood!!! Earlier last week I posted about the gazillion leaves we had to get rid of. Edward came home from work early and started burning them at 4:00. It gets dark here by 5:00, and the city doesn't allow you to burn after dark. We thought the leaves would go up in flames very quickly, but that wasn't the case. It had rained several days before, so all that really happened was we just created a giant ball of stinking smoke. P. U. I was really embarrassed by the smell. At about 5:30 I convinced Edward that he really needed to put the fire/smoke out before we got a fine for burning after dark. I went in the house to fix dinner. Edward came in about 15 minutes later, so I figured everything was put out. Fast forward to about 8:30. I went to run an errand. When I pulled into our neighborhood (four streets away from ours) about 15 minutes later, smoke was everywhere!!!! At first I thought, "Wow. It's a really foggy night." As I pulled into our drive way, I saw the leaf pile glowing at the end or our property! I was in a panic. You can't even imagine the amount of smoke that consumed as far as I could see. I ran down to the pile and started dousing it with the water hose. I called Edward on my cell phone and told him to get out there. He told me he would finish putting the kids to bed. Apparently he wasn't as concerned as I was! At about that I heard fire engines in the distance. I started saying out loud, "Oh, PLEASE don't let that be for us?!" Thankfully it wasn't. Edward finally came out, and said, "Whoa." He didn't think it was such a big deal. He said everything was soaked by now so it would be fine. I on the other hand was so paranoid for the rest of the night. I kept going out to check on it every twenty minutes or so, and I certainly didn't sleep well that night.

Now, I'm thinking the neighbors are probably not so annoyed at Mr.-Blow-My-Leaves-In-Everyone-Else's-Yard anymore. I'm sure WE'RE the tacky neighbors now.

P.S. The pile that we started to burn isn't even 1/3 of the leaves that we have. Edward said he would burn the others while I am Christmas shopping on Saturday. I think I'm going to try to bag them while he's at work this week so I can save myself the embarrassment!