I pit idiots who let their wives almost burn down the neighbor’s eucalyptus grove.
Once a month, my wife gets aches and pains. That’s today, so I asked her if she wanted to relax and watch a movie or something. No, she’d rather start a fire. I’m not speaking of a small trash fire, but burning an acre or more of weeds. On a hot day(). I checked our running water: Not running. But lack of running water doesn’t matter much I guess: even with it, by the time we got a long-enough hose connected and unkinked any fire would be out of control anyway. :smack:
( - Yes, a hot summer day. We’re in the Northern Hemisphere, but winter lasts for only 2 or 3 weeks here and has been over for a while.)
Big flames; fires die down; I’m relieved. No … premature relief: She starts another fire. I give up in annoyance and go back to browsing SDMB.
Before long … panicked screaming! I race out. Normally we proceed through the fields with caution after they’ve been burned, as snakes will be about looking for a new home, but this is not the time for caution about snakes. The fire has spread to our property line. “We” started the fire now because neighbor’s sugar has been cut down already, but the fire has gotten to a corner with another neighbor’s eucalyptus grove. This was all part of the “plan,” mind you: my wife thought she could single-handedly protect the eucalyptus grove, but didn’t realize there were enough dry leaves among the sugar stumps to set that field on fire, and had to abandon the eucalyptus to save the sugar stumps. So there I am, trying to hold the fire back from the eucalyptus while she puts out the fires in the other neighbor’s sugarcane field.
And if those tall dryish gum-trees ignite I don’t think we’ll be able to stop it. I’m pretty sure the law reads “You burn it, you buy it.”
I’m not a country boy and don’t recall ever fighting a threatening fire before. (I doubt if fires were even legal where I lived in California.) But somehow, with me following wife’s instructions, the two of us managed to put out the fires. Besides killing some sugarcane stumps and a dozen teak trees, all ends well. (The teak trees were pretty much in their death throes anyway from all the
previous fires.) I didn’t have time to change into “fire-fighting clothes” and am sure Mrs. Septimus will yell at me for wearing nice (but unwashable) beige trousers on “fire day.” :smack:
So, I got a little adrenaline throbbing through my veins this afternoon. Any other Dopers whose wives are pyromaniacs?
