Guy Fawkes Day

Who loves bonfires?

Ooh, me, me, pick me!

Really, who doesn't love bonfires?

They are warm and bright on a cold dark night. A gathering place for friends. A beautiful pit of crackling and popping in the midst of a quiet evening. They're great!

Thus Guy Fawkes Day is a great day to celebrate. Not only do you build a bonfire you get to build Guy Fawkes. Then BURN him! Mwaahaaha!

Here is my Guy Fawkes Fire. For those of you who are in-the-know this takes place on November 5th. Which shows what a slacker I am in updating our blog.

Here is one of the kindly firefighters putting out my fire. Party crashers! I've learned a valuable lesson in this. Invite all your neighbors to the celebration. That includes the ones that live through the woods, over the river (creek) and across the fields. Yes, invite them before they erroneously report a house on fire. Thanks guys. Love you too.

To my smug satisfaction it took "Clarksville's I-fight-fires-for-a-living" over 30 minutes to put my fire out. With my previously prepared and nearby water hose and my water that I pay for. Again thanks for that. During this 30 plus minutes of praise for a well built fire, apologies for ruining an obviously harmless event and watching my beautiful creation dwindle to smolder my concern for our surrounding community increased greatly. These so called fire fighting machines failed to scatter the logs (in my ample fire pit) to remove the hot spots. Which resulted in a nice little camp fire within a few hours.

We were able to scorch our Guy Fawkes after all.

RIP Guy. It's been fun. See you next year with a few more neighbors present and less flashing lights in the driveway.

Harrell's Pumpkin Patch

Here are the fruits of our labors.
They came away with a couple awards at the Halloween party: Most adorable, Most Creative, Best over all.
Can you guess which pumpkin got what?



Trunk or Treat. A lot of fun. A lot of candy. Dave got to show off his sword and used it to open a bag of skittles.



Dave went through quite a bit of rubbing alcohol to keep the fires stoked.



More than meets the eye. The kids were captivated by the color changing LED's.



We thought a sweet four year old girl was going to run off with Bubs our gourd. Once again, the lights. Mesmerizing.



The Carpel tunnel pumpkin. Can you notice anything wrong with the Black Widow? Dave says it's obviously wrong. But right for a Japanese Black Widow. I so think he made that up. But he sounded so convincing I didn't question it at the time.



Happy Halloween Everyone!

The next post will have nothing to do with pumpkins.  Promise.

Gearing up for Halloween

Tonight for date-night we carved pumpkins. This is the last year that we do this with kitchenware. Our ward Halloween party is tomorrow and we went with what we had. I picked a crappy flimsy kithen knife and a triangular file. Valli has been chipping away on her pumpkin for hours with a paring knife.



There must be better tools than these. Anyway- I am finished. The fact that it is completely on fire just makes it an authentic Dave Harrell pumpkin.



Isn't it just the cutest thing?

Sorry Honey!

"Sorry honey, sorry honey, sorry honey!" Heard tumbling from Dave at high speed, high volume and pitch. In sync to his person barreling from the bathroom, through the house and out the front door.  Upon further inspection to this spontaneous event Dave was 
discovered on the lawn having just put out a small fire. 
Located in the bathroom trash can. 

It took at least an hour to be rid of both the chuckles and large silly grin.



Rationing the matches may be in order. Does anyone think that extreme?

A Few Of My Favorite Things.

Saturday afternoon I went to the Land Between the Lakes Rec area with my wife and some friends. While there we played in the lake, went off-roading, grilled some brats and roasted some mallows. I brought some fireworks with me because- it's always the right time for fireworks. We used the bottle rocket sticks to roast marshmallows. Naturally that evolved into the shooting of marshmallows into the air. The culmination of our mallows and explosives combo was marshmallow grenades.

Step one- Cram a stick of water dynamite or M-5000 (toned down M-80) into a large marshmallow
Step two- Light
Step three- Count to 4 and throw

The result is an explosion of flavor. Have fun dodging flying shards of fluffy goodness. It's so easy a child could do it. Um but they shouldn't.
I think this is one of the better ideas I have ever had. Not just because it is fun, but because it combine two treasured summer traditions into one.
I am not done with the evolution of this new novelty either. I am planning a PVC marshmallow grenade launcher blowgun. I wish my digital camera was working. Stay tuned.