Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

The weather is finally warming up, and the various tree-of-heaven bushes around the property have erupted in growth that is almost as fast as kudzu.

( Porch Plant )

We have the tools and will start cutting these trees back again before they overwhelm the porch and sidewalk. I started a new burn pile with what I cut yesterday from one of the trees trying to prevent us from walking between the front porch and the garage.

On Sunday, people came to the vacant lot to the west of Fernley House and cut down nearly all of the trees on the lot, including most of those along the fence that separates our house from that lot.

( Trees Into Brush )

We don't know why the trees were cut down. There was a real estate agent here a year or two ago hawking this lot as a place to build a 4-plex or 6-plex, which seemed optimistic to me, but maybe that's what's happened here. Alternatively, the owner may have had the lot cited as a fire hazard and decided to just clear-cut it.

Today we tackled the tree-of-heaven that grows along the fence opposite our front door.

( Severe Trimming )

The brush pile is growing bigger by the day. I'm glad I put the pile well away from the fence.

As the weather warmed, Lisa re-potted the little dwarf spruce we got at Christmas. So far it seems to be doing well.

( Spruce Buds )

The hardest part of raising these little trees has been keeping them watered during our summer Worldcon trip. That looks like it won't be such a problem this year.

Yesterday afternoon, Lisa got out the chainsaw and we started to go to work on the pieces of wood that were too knotted to split. Things went well for a while, and I hauled a hand-cart-full of pieces to the wood shed. Wow, is the grain in some of those knots tight! No wonder the splitting maul bounced right off of them.

After she cut one of the larger pieces in two, and one of the remaining pieces looked like it should split pretty easily, so Lisa backed off and I took a whack at it with the maul. It split, all right, but the pieces went flying off in both directions. One of them hit the chainsaw that was sitting a meter or two off to the left. Lisa went "Ow!" a couple meters further away as something hit her.

Uh, oh. When the wood hit the chainsaw, it broke the oil cap, which continued onward and hit Lisa. I doubt you could have done this if you'd planned it. No harm to her, but our chainsawing was abruptly curtailed. You can't run the chainsaw without oil, and you have to have the cap in place or else the oil will shoot back out the hole.

We have the saw's instruction manual and parts list. The part itself costs only about $1, but it would cost another $9 in shipping even for ordinary take-a-week shipping, and a lot more for overnight shipping. I'm going to hunt around and see if any of the local saw-supply stores have that particular part in stock. There's a chance that there's a place within walking distance (even here in dinky little Mehama) that has the particular type of oil-cap cover for this saw.

Phooey. If I had been more diligent about moving the other equipment away while I was splitting wood, we would have easily finished reducing those un-splittable logs and also would have cut the various tree branches down to burnable size by the time it cooled sufficiently for Lisa to assay another visit to That Darn Roof.

...woodchips, actually. As I walked to Lisa's father's house this morning, the sun was just hitting the "coal seam" disused drainage ditch on the property and from the pile of vapors coming from it, I worried that maybe somehow something was smoldering in the pile of wood chips from the tree falling work earlier this week. Examining it more closely, however, I saw that it was steam, not smoke. I should have taken a picture. The way the steam was coming off of the damp pile of wood chips and creeping across the field was very interesting. I still wish we'd realized just how much wood-chip debris there was going to be and told the workers to spread it into a currently-unused section of the "coal seam," because it would have been enough to completely flatten out the section in question, which would have been a good thing from our point of view.

In between bands of rain showers and occasional hail this afternoon, I went to work splitting some of the cedar tree. For being green wood, it split surprisingly easily. The only problem is that cedar will burn too hot. Lisa points out that when and if we ever burn this stuff, we'll have to turn the damper way down or we'll burn up the stove. I also split a few pieces of the maple tree we cut last year to see if the wood was still sound. Aside from a layer of mud on the outside and a few bits of fungus growing from them, the wood seemed okay.

We have two splitting mauls and a few wedges. While working on a particularly knotty (literally) piece of wood, the head came off of the smaller maul. At that point, Lisa said it was time to quit, and we went over to the hardware store before it closed so we could buy a new maul, since they didn't have any handles that fit the existing head. Even if we can't fix the head that came off, we can use it as an additional wedge.

We hauled three cart-loads of wood to the wood shed. Based on a cord of wood being 128 cubic feet, it should take 19 loads to make one cord.

If I were going to be here all summer and if I split wood every afternoon, I might possibly get it all split by the end of August.