THINGS ONLY PARENTS SAY (TO EACH OTHER)

Her Awesomeness: "Are all six-year-old boys fixated on farts like Beast is?"

Me: "Wait until he finds out they're flammable."

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And that's gotten 2012 off to a classy start.

THAT PILE OF MULCH CAN DO WHAT?!

So today yours truly was attacking the massive pile of mulch I created last month, spreading it about on some of the recently-cleared stretches of low-lying ground, when...is that smoke?

Turned out it wasn't, or whatever it was stopped doing whatever it was that made whatever it is look like smoke - but apparently, large mulch piles can indeed catch fire...

The wood chips that comprise mulch break down anabolically, much the way compost does, said Jim Taylor, owner of Taylor Recycling in Montgomery, who learned the hard way that mulch can be a menace in big piles. Though the pile sizes at his place conformed to state fire codes, he said, the codes were outdated and didn't allow for what could happen to fine-grind mulch. He estimated that of the eight or so fire calls he had to make – along what he called a painful learning curve – half of them were the results of spontaneous combustion.

Awesome! Continuing...

Hosing down a big pile of mulch might actually increase chances of combustion, he said, since water increases the anabolic breakdown.

And that's great, too! I think the writer meant to use anaerobic (as in this piece), but still. That large mulch pile is now a much smaller, non-critical-mass mulch pile.

BLOGGING THE MINNEWASKA WILDFIRE

Yeah, the day job intruded today - a good hundred miles of schlepping about on some lovely back roads, none of which were close enough to the fire that's been burning since last week at Minnewaska State Park. Not being close enough is a good thing if you live there, but I wanted to gawk do my job as a reporter. The best view I got of the fire's effects was from 20-odd miles away on the Kingston Rhinecliff Bridge where you could see the haze slowly drifting more or less north. From places like Cragsmoor, Alligerville and Kyserike, you could easily smell the fire but just as easily see no sign of it if you were down in one of the deep gullies in the area.

Still. There's loads of fuel for fires in that part of the county this time of the year, and I'm quite surprised it's been 36 years since our region has had a fire this extensive. Next time your local fire department has the boot out for donations, drop a 20 in there if you can swing it. Chances are they've had somebody over at that fire this week, and that's some rough country to be working in.

And then to Target for kitty litter, over to Red Hook for Chinese takeout, and home to the tastiest cuddles on the planet. I shaved this morning, which always rates extra smooches from Noodle.

Tomorrow the kids' day care center is closed. That puts me on solo child-care duty...so if there's another three-thousand-acre wildfire burning by this time tomorrow, you'll have some idea as to why.