Every two or three months, we light up a bonfire in our copper/brass fire pit, we bought Costco about five or six years ago. It was the best 80 bucks we ever spent. We hang out with our neighbors burn up dead branches that have fallen off the trees over the last three months, along with all pine cones that the kids can scrounge up.

Our neighbors come over and we have a few drinks talking while we catch up with each other under the stars. It makes for a very good time and it seems to be a very interesting social tool.

There's something about fire that's ingrained into the human psyche I think. We watch it gazed at it transfixed to a certain extent probably from thousands of years of our predecessors doing the same thing for the last few million years. Maybe in 500,000 years our collective obsession with TV will trigger some form of genetic impact on our own descendants as well.