Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Two days of high winds have finally subsided. I'm glad that I'd fully stocked the wood supply on the front porch, because it meant I didn't have to go far to get more firewood. Today it finally calmed down enough that I could bring more wood from the big box to the porch box without being blown all over the place.

Mid morning today, I had a number of errands to run locally. The first was to drop off a parcel that was a return merchandise item for Kayla. To my annoyance, when I got to the UPS agency, they said they can't process the QR code that the vendor said would print a return label. I had to print one at home, tape it to the package, and bring it back, which I did later in the day.

Speaking of packages, there were a whole bunch of them waiting for me at the post office. I've been so busy with the Day Jobbe today that I still haven't had a chance to open any of them. I do know that one of them was a package of some European-made toothbrushes that Lisa found on her train travels last year. We found one place in the USA that sells them, and I got her five of them.

At Big R, I paid for a pallet of firewood, which will will collect by Thursday, and probably sooner, because there is snow and rain in the forecast for Wednesday night into Thursday. (The pallets of Press-to-Logs are wrapped in plastic.) The weather has been quite cold, with highs just above freezing and overnight lows down to -12&Deg;C.

Finally, I went to Grocery Outlet, which is running a promotion to win free groceries for life. Today was the last day to enter, and by spinning their virtual wheel online, I got 75 bonus entries. Not that I expect to win, since the promotion is for the entire chain, but it would be nice! At Lisa's suggestion, I bought a pound of ground beef. She's making spaghetti for us tonight.

Today I am burning the pallet and logs that Lisa cut up yesterday. It looks like it works out the about one day's worth of firewood, and thus one day's worth of Press-to-Logs that I don't have to burn.

This afternoon, Lisa and I tackled unloading the rest of the latest pallet of firewood.

( Filling the Box, Mostly )

It's always a reassuring feeling to have a full woodbox. Our temperatures are lately ranging between around -7° and +7°C, and it takes extra firewood to keep the living room (which is also my office) habitable.

After we finished the wood work, Lisa drove the minivan around to the far side of the property, where we unhitched the utility trailer and chained it to the fence, as is our usual practice.

Yesterday, we started unloading the Pres-to-Logs from the utility trailer. Although Lisa can't use her left arm due to the rotator cuff injury, she did move logs from the pallet to where I could more easily reach them and put them into a wheelbarrow. I then moved them about 24 at a time to the wood box, where I moved them into the wood box. Lisa also would carry one log at a time.

( Shifting Wood )

After clearing the empty pallets and packaging from the utility trailer, I moved the van and trailer back over to the other side of the property. Lisa, who of course still has one arm working, backed the trailer into place and we unhitched it and chained it to our fence to prevent anyone from making off with it.

Now we have our main vehicle usable again, which is good, because we have plans for this weekend.

This morning, very light snow (not enough to stick) was falling when I went out to wave at Amtrak coming through. Little bits of cold rain, sleet, or snow fell off and on throughout the morning. There was a break in the weather and around 1:30 PM we decided to take a shot at getting that firewood unloaded.

( Firewood, Completed )

Just as we were putting the sheets of plastic over the wood and getting the box closed, the snow/sleet mix started again. It still wouldn't stick (the air temperature was 4°C), fortunately. Lisa moved the trailer over back behind the house, chained it to the fence to discourage people from trying to haul it away, and got the pickup truck back into the garage.

So that's the firewood situation settled for another month. After I get back from SMOFCon, we will need to see about getting another pallet. Possibly before them I will check with them to make sure that they've ordered more pallets of wood. If we had a place to keep the pallets, we'd order more than one of them, but we have no way to unload an entire pallet at once for ground storage. Even if we had a forklift, it would probably get bogged down in the soft dirt in the East Lot.

It has been raining today, which means we can't unload the pallet of firewood today.

( Keeping the Wood Dry )

This is not a problem. We do have around a week of wood accessible right now, and we should be able to unload either late Friday or on Saturday morning, before the next storm arrives. This next storm is supposed to bring snow rather than rain, so I hope we manage to get the trailer unloaded before then.

After having the fire out for two days, I got it going again this morning. It takes a while before the heat builds back up, but as long as I got it cooking without constant attention by sundown today, I was going to be okay. Tonight the temperatures are supposed to drop below freezing again, which is why I needed the fire to be warming things up again.

As I mentioned earlier, after we unloaded the Press-to-Logs, Lisa broke out the electric saw and we reduced the wood we salvaged from the West Lot last year and other bits of wood that have been cluttering our yard.

( Not Much, but it Burns )

There's not a whole lot of it, but it will burn, albeit not as efficiently as the Press-to-Logs. I've taken to bringing in an armload of it each day and burning it then. It leaves a lot more ash, but it does produce heat, and it only cost us our labor and a little bit of electricity.

As of today, we down to about two weeks worth of firewood. Fortunately, Big R had a couple of pallets of Press-to-Logs in stock, so yesterday I went down and paid for one and put it on hold. This morning, Lisa hitched up the Small Orange Pickup (the Astro is still in the shop and I don't know when I will get it back), we dragged the utility trailer over to Pilot and paid $2.50 to air up the tires, and we went to Big R and collected the pallet. We'll unload it when we have the energy.

Lisa continues to talk about building a second wood box so that we can get more than about a month's worth of firewood in stock. We've identified the space; it's just a matter of getting the energy to work on building it.

On Sunday, I checked with Big R and found that they had one pallet of Pres-to-Logs. (It's a good thing that I keep the SKU for those logs on a note attached to the refrigerator, as the people at Big R always think I'm asking about wood pellets.) I went there on Sunday and paid for the logs, and yesterday, Lisa hooked up the utility trailer and we went down there and collected a ton of firewood.

( Ready for Transloading )

We'll get to work on this when both Lisa and I have the time to work on it, as it's a two-person job. Lisa stands in the trailer and hands me logs, and I carry them over to the wood box.

Lisa and I continued to work on reducing the pile of pallets over the weekend. By the time we finished, there were only about 1 1/4 pallets left, and the wood box was nearly completely full of both Pres-to-Logs and pieces of pallet. The weather got warmer and more spring-like, so I let the fire go out so that I could dig out ash, and also nails, as when you burn these old pallets, you end up with old nails in the ashes, of course.

( Then the Snow Came Back )

The pallets burn well — a little too well sometimes. They burn relatively fast and I need to keep loading more wood into the fireplace much more often than with the Pres-to-logs. But of course this is wood that did not cost us anything extra, and it also means we are clearing out the junk pallets.