Oct 3 - dropping and splitting

Per the plan, Jim was here at 9am.

I attached his steel cable to the hemlock as far up as I could get it with the ladder, he used the come-along to tension the cable to a tree across the driveway, I did the cutting and the tree dropped right where we wanted it. The easy part was done.

With both of us working our chain saws, we de-limbed and cut up the tree. It was a big one, not as big around as the pine out front, but close.

Next we moved to the road between here and Matthews, doing the same thing with the standing-dead maple tree, dropping it across the road. We cut that up, threw the branches down the embankment, loaded up some of the pieces into Jim's trailer, then headed off to lunch. Jim was expecting visitors and said that we'd get back at it around 3pm. That was about noon.

As I was eating lunch, Jim called to say that his visitors would be a little late and he'd meet me up on the road to clear the debris at 1pm. We did that, raking the small stuff off the road, then loaded the rest of the wood into his trailer. I went to get my 4-wheeler and went over to Jim's to get the splitter.

We split wood until his visitors came, then we split the remaining 2 dozen large pieces in half, since it took two of us to lift them. Jim then went home while I continued splitting those half sized pieces into fireplace size. Jim came back just as I finished, then we went over to his place and split the maple.

4pm and we were finished. Finished, that is, except for all the cleanup that I have to do and wood piling. Having a wheelbarrow would help ... but of course my tire is split. I'll get to it. The wood isn't going anywhere.

There were some carpenter ants in the tree but it wasn't in too bad shape. It wasn't about to fall, but of course you don't know that for sure until you can see its innards.

As I said to Jim as we were splitting the wood -- it's not the best firewood. As he said -- but the price is right. Yes, the price is right. I think that he ended up with the better deal though, nice dry maple. I've got wet hemlock, a lot of wet hemlock. Two years from now it will be dry hemlock, fast burning, lots of ash ... but the price is right.

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Fallout ...

Doing some work with pictures, I found some that were corrupted, a result of the disk issues that I had. Luckily I still had those pictures in the camera, so I copied them onto the hard drive again. Actually, since the camera writes onto two SD cards, I've got multiple backup. Good. What a pain.

Speaking of pain, some more fallout. My hands are like claws this morning, arthritis swelling the fingers from the work yesterday. This is going to get worse with the years so I'd better get used to it. I remember Jack Davies (Jason's Dad) claw-like grip with a handshake. I'll be there soon, at this rate. Great.

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We had stuffed trout for dinner last night, which was "ok" but the trout seemed ho-hum. It was fresh, that wasn't the problem, but it didn't have much flavour.

Sandy is going into Sudbury today and will be picking up the Thanksgiving turkey; I'm going for a bike ride !

Before biking I'll probably do some cleanup from the tree work yesterday. I'm not starting the woodpile yet, need to get the wheelbarrow fixed first.

Onward ...