The Hammock District: Valentines Day

February 15th was the state of Oregon's 150th birthday (as well as that other Hallmark holiday) so we decided to celebrate in our usual fashion with many adult beverages and that adult game with ping pong balls. It was a decidedly normal afternoon and evening, we fired up the grill and I made a couple of steaks. Afterward, the adult pong-based game continued. We started talking about how my friends had this fire pit ring that they had been given but they had never used it. More consumption of adult beverages continued and the idea of a fire smoldered in their minds until they decided, "Hey, let's burn our old Christmas tree!" With the helpful prodding of the adult beverages and the innate love of fire we all seemed to share, the Christmas tree was doused and then lit in not perhaps the safest fashion:

It did create this cool Christmas lights effect though:

But that just didn't work that well...the tree was too green to go up. So we had to create some coals and in order to do this we were going to need furniture.

This got a good hot fire going eventually and we were able to get some good coals...and I got some cool pictures.

Then a neighbor, seeing the joy we seemed to be having around our fire, decided to join us and asked if we would also burn her leftover Christmas tree. Hers was decidedly drier and therefore went up really quickly in our extremely hot coals:

After this died down, I figured we'd had our pyromaniacal fun for the night so I went back inside the house. Returning a few moments later, I discovered that the others we apparently unsatisfied with the sanity level of the evening:

The couch was old, damp, iced over and covered in crap from having sat in their backyard for months. Little did the couch know it would be sacrifice to the state of Oregon and the love gods. It steamed for a long time as it dried. Then someone got the brilliant idea of putting coals in the middle:

And it was on, as they say, like Donkey Kong:

After a good while of burning the couch, paranoia kicked in and the idea of the cops being called seemed more and more plausible as the stench of the couch was untenable even for those who thought burning the couch was a great idea. Thus ended the story of this couch, and cleanup in the morning was a blast, of course.