New Year's Eve 2006

New Year's Eve in the hills of Puerto Rico...

What did you do on New Year's Eve? usually, we don't even go out, just hang out at home. 2006 was very different, though. Here's what we (me, my wife, my son, Chris, and his girlfriend, Lauren) did:

We made a big pile from two queen size mattresses, along with their box springs, a large couch and a small couch, all of which had been badly damaged by rats and termites as they sat in an unoccupied house on the west side of Puerto Rico, which is nestled in an old coffee farm that is now more like a mini rain forest.

Chris then poured some gasoline on the furniture and applied a match.

Whoosh! An enormous fire immediately engulfed the pile, as Chris ran backwards as fast as he could to avoid having his eyebrows singed right off his face.

The flames rose some thirty feet in the air, throwing off a beautiful, but scary, fountain of sparks and burning fragments of upholstery. Even twenty feet away from the fire, the heat was awesome.

Click here (12MB file, sorry) to watch a short video of these amazing New Year's fireworks.

After I doused the glowing embers with water, we all agreed that it was an awful lot of fun, but also kind of dumb and careless. But the house didn't catch fire, the trees and plants nearby didn't catch fire (though lots of the leaves closest to the fire, turned brown and shriveled a bit), and no one was badly burned (well, I did do something really stupid and ended up with a couple of small burn blisters on my foot, but we won't get into that).

May your 2007 be as bright and intense, and result in no damage done, as our furniture bonfire!