Fresh...Exciting !

OK, now that I've given Janey her weekly shameless plug ( cause I wanna get her some more traffic flow on her blog ), I can now talk about me.
Today was bizarre.
It actually started yesterday evening when I was gonna load the riding lawn mower onto the trailer and then hook that to the truck and take it down to be serviced before the lawn gets too long. Well, we hadn't used the truck in a while and the dome-lite had stayed on and drained the battery. Well, let's pull out the battery charger and recharge, right ? Wrong. Nothing. So, let's remove battery and buy new one. No. The bolt holding it in is rusted and won't budge (even after some W D 40 and a broken socket handle ). Call the free towing service. Yay ! That choice worked. Now the driver wanted to look at the battery, he said the battery still looked good. He gave it a jump from his tow-truck and BAM !
My dad drove the truck to Wal-Mart while I drove mom in my Buick. The fuse was promptly removed from the dome-lite and the battery replaced.

We're done, right ?
Wroooooooooooonnnnnnnnng !!!!!!!
While shopping at Harding's grocery market me and mom gabbed with some people we know who work there, and in the course of conversation the subject of the weather came up. Yep, Colorado is getting from 10 - 30 inches of snow. Yep, we have sunshine, dry weather, and strong winds. Cindy who works in receiving mentioned that small brush fires have been reported in Kalamazoo ( I live here ) the last week or so. Well, we drove back home rubber-necking at all the construction work on the way (Kalamazoo is experiencing a renaissance in commercial and residential developement). While driving down the street where my house is I saw huge amounts of smoke billowing across the road. I mean HUGE amounts of smoke!
I said somethin' along the lines of 'Oh s**t !' and my mom said 'Ahhhh !'
I sped up and kept thinking 'dad had better be safe...' until I saw that the smoke was comming not from the house...but from across the street from the woods.

Long story short. I spent about two hours raking and stomping out fires in that wood along-side the firefighters who joined me 15-20 minutes later while my mom consoled the elderly gentleman who was burning leaves in his burn-pit ( which was the cause of the raging inferno ).
Eventually I ran from house to house checking on people (a fair number of residents here are senior citizens or horse owners) to make sure everybody was OK. No problems occured so that's good.
Everybody's houses were safe (this is the country, not suburbs) and mom and I ended up on the 6 pm news when News Channel 3 showed up to view the carnage. My shoes are messed up. My clothes smell like charcoal. My mom briefly lost her voice due to smoke inhalation (my throat isn't feelin' too sprightly either). And I got to see just how much I look like an androgenous he/she on TV.

Grand.
So that's why I'm kinda late with posting stuff on my blog. The house still smells smokey. Bev (daughter in law of the elderly gentleman) came by and thanked us for helping out. She's pretty cool, so's her husband. She said her father in law feels devastated (he in his 80's) and that he has a lil' problem with common sense. He seemed like a sweet but befuddled guy, although he was also very concerned about the wildfire at the time, so I'm not gonna dwell on it too much.
Time for me to gobble up some of those dark chocolate Eskimo Pies that I bought at Harding's. Gawd, that seems so long ago...

Anyway, here'z the moral: If you are gonna start a fire outside ( whether for burning trash or for a cook-out ) DON'T do it when the conditions are warm, breezy, and dry ! This could happen to YOU ! And I don't know where you live so I can't put out any blazes if you ignore my advise.
World Wrestling Entertainment is on now and Molly Holly is walking down the gangplank (she' my fav ! ) so I'm gonna break and watch this cutie for a while.
I've really gotta get those sex-change surgeries soon. I can't believe I look that strange...
Cheers.