Fire!

Sitting by our little fire chiminea the other night, I got the brilliant idea that it would be so much better with some forced air feeding the fire.  So a few nights later...

Drilled a few holes.

Attach a section of flexible ventilation tubing.

Hook up the old blower from the now defunct water slide.

And presto... instant roaring fire!

The downside appears to be that it shoots flaming coals 10 feet from the fire.  The addition of a throttling valve a few nights later solved that problem.  It worked fantastic over Christmas.  I went from pile of wood to coals for roasting dogs and marshmallows in approximately 5 minutes.

We also performed another fire first over Christmas, at least for our house.  Grandpa has had a sort of tradition of cooking a turkey in a trash can.  And since they came to our house for Christmas, we had to pull it off here.

Making preparations to the can and building a turkey stand.

Inserting the bird, stuffed with fresh herbs from the garden.

Levi doing the honors.

Burned down to a nice glowing heap of coals.

Checking the temp on the bird.  Just right, and the legs were falling off.

 

I'm not sure a cell phone picture really makes the turkey look all that delicious... but it was!