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This is our vehicle to keep you all informed of our comings and goings - within limits fitting our decorum of course. Have a good time reading our diary.
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Trumped
Posted on November 9th, 2016 No commentsToday I awoke and started to prepare the day. A quick check of the email was absent any political emails. I new this could not be good news so I checked further and found out we are Trumped. After that the day became one of the usual routine. I made my Oatmeal with rasians and nuts plus some other items of interest and started the coffee. However, I had little interest in my usual morning routine.
I quickly dressed for the 40’s and headed to the barn to get out the chainsaw. I filled the oil and gas tanks and headed for the woods to cut the downed tree that we felled this summer. I prepared a 16″ stick to use
as a cutoff measurement and started to cut. I had the 15″ diameter tree cut up in reasonably quick order at 16″± lengths. I was starting to get a little tired by the time SAM arrived but continued to cut a few of the bigger limbs and cleared a path to get the logs out of the woods: That is when disaster struck. I was cutting a 6″ limb that had been on the ground for some years and was pretty rotten and hit a 3/4″ steel pipe that was laying on the log. Well, that was the end of wood cutting for the moment, so I took the saw into the barn and sharpened it – after removing the tightly held shavings that filled the left side teeth. By this time SAM was rolling the logs out of the woods so i pitched in to help. In no time at all we had got them all out of the woods and I started the splitter and we went to work splitting all the wood. By noon we had a full truck full of finely split wood that SAM had carefully placed. The truck was fully loaded that is for sure. We drove it up top and went inside for lunch. The lunch was high carb for me and a salad for SAM and after a while I went back out to unload the truck. By the time it was mostly unloaded (almost exactly a Rank) SAM came out and we finished and went down to to the woods to finish splitting and loading what we had cut up in 16″ lengths. As we were finishing us Mike of Fox Lane Farms arrived and we helped him load the wood he had bought from us. We had a great chat while working. The good news is he wants more wood so that will about wrap up our wood cutting for this year.
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A day in the life of….
Posted on November 9th, 2016 No commentsSAM & I spent the day from sunrise to sunset splitting the wood from the dead Ash trees we were forced to cut. To me it is so sad to see a tree that has weathered many a storm standing dead. I love trees and wood and lumber. My grandfather was a lumberman and had a lumber yard and mill operation. I spent my childhood roaming the mill and remember quite vividly laying on the pine boards smelling the pitch.
I also remember getting a box car of lumber packed to the top with all sorts of boards. I will not bore anyone with the types and dimensions nor with the smells inside the car when we opened it on a hot summer day. However, I will tell you of the pleasures and terrors of a little kid, maybe eight years old or less who because of his size, had the pleasure of sliding down the lumber with his back to the top of the boxcar and stomach to the wood clear to the front of the car. I would then push out the boards so “the hands” could get a hold of them. In a short time there was enough space to turn around and I could breath again. Of course, there were the hands that wished to terrorize the kid and would push boards back on me to trap me. I remember them well but they are all gone now.Tomorrow will be a very full day in the cold weather. We will cut some new logs that are 16″ or less and then split them to fulfil a customer complaint of too long firewood. We thought we were doing him a favor since were selling by the rank and not the cord. So basically he was getting a 22″ wide stack instead of the 16″ stack. However, he is returning 1/3 cord that was over 20″ long. More on this tomorrow.