Education and Fire

I think that I need to be taught how to build a fire in the fireplace because that is a skill they did not teach me in Girl Scouts (I only went to something like four meetings and then quit...long story) and apparently Kevin went to the prissy boy's Boy Scout club because he said and I need to quote this, "I grew up in a civilized area where we didn't need to learn fire skills."  *eye roll*  That was an obvious jab at my country bumpkin upbringing, so what if the nearest mall was over 2 hours away or the nearest hospital over an hour away (sure our town had a hospital but people only went there to die).

So yeah, I had it in my head that we needed to build a fire in our fireplace because we had some firewood that I bought last year from the gas station sitting in the garage and I figured we should at least use some of it, right?!  Well, after nagging endlessly, Kevin wads up some newspaper and puts in the fireplace and adds a couple of pieces of the wood I had purchased for the fireplace and the paper was the only thing that burned.  Repeat, repeat, repeat......after about an hour we gave up.

The next morning I had a great idea, I wanted to give it a try, I pulled the bark off of the wood pieces and cris-crossed  the 2 pieces of wood and stuck the bark pieces under the wood.....oh yeah, and I had a cardboard box that I had all of that sitting on top of and I swear to you the cardboard box must have been flame resistant because that darn thing did not want to light for the love of all things fire.  EVENTUALLY, after stuffing it with newspaper and lighting the newspaper, the cardboard box caught on fire but the wood did not really burn so much as it kinda flamed up a little and then the flames went down and an hour later there were no signs of fire.  So next time I'm going to buy the fire-starter logs that go for about $5 each and then put on my real wood logs and see if I can get a warm fire going in the fireplace.

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And on a completely different tangent when the homework list was sent home with Isabella on Monday I looked over the list and thought the vocabulary words looked very familiar so I looked through the past vocabulary tests and saw that they were familiar, in fact all six vocabulary words were the exact same words as a list we got back when it was still warm (maybe even hot) outside.  I sent a quick e-mail to the teacher wanting to know if this was a review week or if there was a mistake. No, it wasn't a review week, there was a mistake.  The new words were sent out today. 

I'm relieved.