What an eventful and productive weekend! This is my husband, the Bear, preparing the burn pile pre-brush clearing.

He's quite the fire starter and is very successful burning brush piles.

He's also very cautious and careful with his fires, unlike myself, my father and my brother.

I come from a long line of fire starters. I started to say careless fire starters, but that's not the case. Maybe overly ambitious and not totally realistic would describe them?

There are numerous family fire stories to relate, probably more than anyone would want to read.

 Uncle Willie  accidentally burned the entire West We Go subdivision in the 70's. Thank goodness it was only subdivided without houses, but it was quite a fire!

My father once set our house on fire, purely by accident.

But my brother has topped us all. We think he may have used the newspaper declaring a fire ban in the county to start the fire. The wind took the fire away from his control, and required airplanes and bulldozers to contain.


This is the Bear's clearing at the end of the day.

Notice the fire never escaped the original fire pit, and it's still smoldering.

I mentioned eventful, but it had nothing to do with the fire department this weekend.

Thorn bush in isolation

Meet my thorn tree. I have thousands of these bushes, so it's a little unusual to see one all by itself.

My husband, the Bear, and I are currently in an epic struggle to eradicate these thorns of biblical proportion that are taking over our land.

We're not so sure what they're called, so if you know, please give us a shout and educate us as to the accurate name for these bushes.

Sometimes we call them trees, they can grow twice as tall as this one.

Some even grow lemons in the summer, so I'm wondering if there are actual male and female plants.

We've heard them called quince and hedge lemons.

My grandsons call them the enemy. I think they're right. They love to go out with us to "fight" them.

Fog, drizzle, rain, cold and darkness engulf my home. From the couch, I sit and watch football.

Single, single, single chain stitch, can't wait to get to another row to double chain.

Trying to make a scarf on this dreary, wintry evening.

The evening sky has been magnificent! And I'm not the only one whose noticed! I've seen numerous pictures of the evening sky on Facebook and others have blogged about it also.

This reminds me of the Marshall Tucker song;

"And there's fire on the mountain, lightnin' in the air
Gold in them hills and it's waitin' for me there "

It really wasn't this bright, but my camera caught the hues and magnified them until they look like fire!

Today's writing prompt asked if I would watch a movie after missing a few minutes of the beginning.

It really depends on the movie, and the audience. If others are watching, I'd go ahead and watch. If it were a comedy I could watch without the beginning.

If it were just me and my honey, and a serious movie, I'd have to insist that I see it from the beginning.

This isn't really an issue in our home anymore, thanks to the invention of the DVR. We record practically everything we watch.

Then we watch when we want, and rewind what we missed, stop and start at will.

I'm starting to get this mindset that I can rewind anything. Driving my car, listening to the radio, I turn it down to go to the bank, then when I turn it back up, I hear something I wanted to hear, and instantly my brain tells me to hit the rewind button.

Obviously, I don't have a rewind button on the radio in my car.

I wish I could rewind the sunset for others to see too!

This was the beautiful sunset that I saw this evening.

As I came to my computer to log in and blog, I just had to stop by Facebook for a second to "see what everyone else" was doing. I saw two other pictures similar to mine.

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who noticed the beautiful sunset this evening.

I'm having trouble blogging this week. I'm having more trouble with the prompts. I've let them pile up, a couple of days now, without blogging, and when I think about the writing prompts I start feeling like it is a job I have to perform.

I think I'd like to "be like everyone else" and just write about what I want to write about.

Reading others' blogs, as the sun sets, seems of more interest to me today.

Friday's post was to blog about your first love. I've pondered this question for a few days now, I've not been able to blog, too many chores at home.

There is no doubt that my first love is horses. Previously I wrote about learning to write, the first word I wrote was a race horse name. Blue jacket.

 I still have the book with the childish scrawl, Blue jacket. I think the horse's name was actually Yellow jacket.

But I think the way the story actually went was that I wanted to be a horse, and I wanted a name.

 So my father gave me my own  name, similar to the race horse, but unique to me. I must have been wearing a blue jacket.

 I've always been intrigued by race horse names.

For a considerable amount of my young life, I wanted to be a horse. I nickered and neighed, pawed the ground, and the only gait I had was a gallop.

One of my earliest school memories involves my dad. When I was in the third grade, my dad took a new position as the principal of an elementary school in a nearby "big city". Being from a rural area, I was not too excited about leaving my small school and friends, not to mention having to leave my horse with my grandparents. .

I believe my father was recruited for this position to straighten a problem school out and turn things around. I was enrolled in the third grade, and entered a classroom where I knew no one. I was known for being pretty tough. After all, I had red hair and freckles. Anyone with red hair and freckles knows what I'm talking about.

During the first few days of school, all the students were assembled in the auditorium to meet the new principal, my father. He presented the new school policy with strong admonitions for fighting. Evidently, fighting was a big problem at this school.

 The punishment for fighting would be that everyone involved in a fight would suffer corporal punishment. I didn't know if the other students knew how serious he was by his tone, but I knew that he was not kidding!

The next recess break, I was approached by another red headed girl in my class, who obviously wanted to see how serious me and my father were. So, I was the first one in the Principal's office that day, after the whole school received the no fighting policy.