After we got done clearing out the old garden and hauling tires into Kiel, WI for disposal, we took all of our scrap dry wood and tree branches and made a nice burning pile.
I stacked it so that it wouldn’t get out of hand and because it was so close to the garage and house, we had two water sources to keep it down if things got too crazy.

So we finished up this HARD day of work with three pitchers of Sangria and a big-ass fire.  You really can’t do too much better than that.

THAT would be Cyndi saluting our work after our first glass of sangria!

So we drank a second pitcher and thought it seemed like a really, really good idea to start scavenging the barn and farm for more dry lumber that wasn’t firewood she would need this winter.  We found an old door in the second storey of the barn extension.  I was hesitant, but when I saw that it had been cut down a couple of times and wasn’t restorable, in it went… along with some old rotten 2x4s and more than a couple of split pieces of real firewood that we decided to sacrifice.

It is always neat to watch structural things burn – things that have panels and edges.  The fire consumes them at the weirdest points and in some of the thinner spots they burn from the middle out.  In the case of the door, it caught fire first where the panels join the frame.
We just watched it from there…

As we watched it burn down we decided to open a third bottle of wine and make a third pitcher of fortified sangria.  This too seemed like a good idea.

We began to drink it and talked about how we may be burning some kind of a portal door.

So then the party came to an end, as these things often do, by a little kick and over pitcher #3 goes…  So sad.  We thought (briefly) about pulling out the whiskey, but then decided that would be too much and got ready for bed after digging out and muting the fire a bit.  It had started to drizzle a little and we felt safe that everything was under control.

Fast forward to the next morning and I am uploading images from the camera to the Mac.  Everything is clipping along until I get this series:

And so there you go.  We shouldn’t have burnt the ghostly monster portal door.  THAT, my friends, is what too much sangria fortified with vodka will do.