The weather here has been a bit nutty this past week. You'd think, given that it's the last week of March and has been officially spring for a short while now, that one might get spring-like weather. Rain is perfectly common and expected in the Willamette Valley this time of year. Or any time of year, really. Hail is somewhat less expected. Snow is right out. But we've been getting all three, with intermittent gusts of wind and occasional sunshine, all within regular 10-minute intervals.

Naturally, it's at this time that one of my neighbors decides to get rid of some of the brush on his property. This neighbor lives across the road, in what I've come to view as the idiot house. In the nearly 2 decades I've lived here, around half a dozen families have lived in that house. And all of them have been dumber than the unholy offspring of a particularly inbred turkey and a brain-dead cow after a week-long alcohol binge.

Mind you, considering that property is 75% underwater every winter, it's probably necessary to have an IQ in the double digits to buy the place to begin with. But even so, they never fail to achieve some spectacular new heights of stupidity.

This guy, as I said, decided to get rid of the brush in his yard (caused by the annual flooding) by burning them. Common practice around here. But as noted above, the weather has been rather wet of late. And even if it hadn't, the brush was all pretty green still; it hadn't had the chance to dry out yet. So instead of burning his brush away nice and cleanly, he was essentially creating a massive amount of smoke that was covering the whole neighborhood. (This is a "neighborhood" that spans several acres.) I smelled smoke while inside, looked out, and could only see haze...

Went out to investigate, as it could have been a house fire, to see this paragon of Neanderthal intellect throwing more brush on the pile... I'd say on the fire, except he wasn't managing to get any actual flames going. It was only smoldering, more's the pity. Which is really too bad, because he was manually adjusting the brush and I was half-hoping he'd catch his sleeve on fire. After all, he's going to have to work hard to beat the previous inhabitant, who set his own shed on fire because he couldn't figure out that one does not ignite a bonfire beneath the eaves.