Well, How About That?

To my surprise, the Palo Alto Daily Post today ran my letter saying that if the Peninsula Cities want the rail line undergrounded, they should put together funding to pay the marginal cost of doing so — probably a bond issue covering most of San Mateo County, and not a cheap one, either. I'm not even the only person saying so, as you might see from a cross-reference in the message to which I linked above.

The Daily Post doesn't have online editions. If there's anyone in the area of the paper's distribution, I'd appreciate if you might pick up a copy of the Friday, August 13th edition if it's not too much trouble.

Mehama History

Yesterday, Lisa asked me to scan an old photo of the old house. Besides wanting to preserve the old photo, we also wanted to take a picture of the house from the same angle to compare the changes.

( Old and New )

What a difference a century makes!

Logs Before the Heat Wave

A heat wave is moving in to the Santiam Valley, which is not good for our plans for my last full day here in Mehama. This morning, however, before things really heated up, I got my coveralls on one more time and made a push on the cedar pile.

johno suggested that we should rent a wood splitter, which is a good idea except that many of the rounds here were more than a meter in diameter — far too large for most splitters. Indeed, by definition, any piece of wood too large for me to lift is too big for the machines, since you have to lift the logs into the splitter. However, I got an idea of trying to crack the remaining rounds into pieces small enough to lift and leaving them for later processing.

( Taking a crack at it )

Lisa's father has indicated a willingness to pay for a couple of days log-splitter rental if Lisa and I will do the work. I don't want to even start unless we have all of the rounds — cedar, maple, and poplar &mdash reduced to a size that can be machine-split. If we can get there, I think we should be able to chop it all down to burnable size in about two days of good (meaning neither raining nor blisteringly hot) weather.