Cape Girardeau 11/7

Yesterday started with water and today started with fire.  We’re well on our way to having a day involving each of Aristotle’s elements.  Only thing is today didn’t really start off with fire.  It was supposed to.  We were all prepped in our Nomex at the burn site when we got the word that there would be no prescribed burn today.  Instead, we would be felling trees in the Friends Farm area in preparation for a future burn.  I primarily dealt with Black Locusts, but I also tried my hand at an Ash and a couple of Sycamore trees.  We were given clearance to bring down everything that wasn’t an Oak tree.

The sawing went very well; surprisingly I walked away from the spiky invasives without a scratch.  Black Locusts have bigger thorns than Autumn Olives, in case you were wondering.  The second years were telling me horror stories about Black Locusts and how they tend to give as good as they get, but my biggest issue was the thorns on the ground.  Thorns were unavoidable unlike their tall, pointy, doomed brethren.  They tore chunks out of me and my clothes.  Oi.  Why do thorns exist?  Do they produce fruit?  What is their contribution to nature?  I tried to be nice and weave my way through nature’s barbed wire but it decided to try and go all Gandalf on me.  Unfortunately for them, this Balrog had a chainsaw.

Life is still a bit off for me, for lack of a better term.  That “Fly Me to the Moon” song has been stuck in my head.  Only the chorus though so I have slowly been going insane.  My best guess for this development was Pacific Rim triggered a tie to Evangelion, which has the song play in its closing credits.  We haven’t seen that film in over a week though; tonight we watched The Purge where America’s government decided to designate a 12 hour span to do whatever you wanted.  The hope is that people will kill off the non-contributors in our society, but some people use it to take out competitors at work among other things.  According to the movie this 1 day resulted in only 1% unemployment and the elimination of our nation’s debt…  I don’t think that would actually happen.  Kudos to the script writer for thinking outside of the box in trying to solve our nation’s ever increasing problems though.

 Tomorrow we are supposed to do the burn we were scheduled to do today.  We also have to pack out and clean, which means an earlier start than usual.  So, time for bed.  I wish you all the best.  Take care of yourselves.