TChem, you are totally right on the pyro thing. My grad adviser used to get a funny sort of gleam in his eye whenever March (the prescribed-burn season) would roll around. And I remember once, one of my profs posting this announcement in class:

"Don [the campus horticulturalist] is going to go burn something this afternoon. I don't know where and I don't know what, but he says it's going to be a good time."

I guess I'm still a little bit afraid of/too respectful of fire to be a real pyro, but it's interesting to watch the prairie burns. (I've been at a few. I always took "flapper duty" - they give you these things like truck mudflaps on a rake handle, and the idea is if the fire starts to creep across the boundary lines, or if there are "hot spots" once the main fire line has moved out of the area, you smother it with the flap. Being the water-backpack-person - where you get something like a jerry can full of water strapped to a back, with a hose and nozzle attached - looked like fun but for some reason the men in the group always grabbed those first. Perhaps there's an underlying anatomical reason for that...)

Prairie burns (done right) are much calmer and less violent than other types of fire - ideally, the fire creeps sort of slowly towards the center of the site, and then when the firelines converge (in the center, where they can't really hurt anyone), then they go up big. But I've also heard of burns that crossed the line and "crown jumped" into adjacent forest.

Oh, and I think the box must have come...had a package slip in my mailbox yesterday. I'm going to try to pick it up this afternoon.