Four hours of wood splitting so far this week…

And boy are my arms tired.

Took a moment to stage a tidy little photo sesh right by the pile there, looking sharp. Found a number of rounds that 8 just could not crack at all. My pile for the hydraulic splitting is growing rather fast. Or, now hear me out here, I might just be tired, and weak in the shoulders and back, and thus — cannot split some of the tougher, wetter rounds that haven’t developed much by way of internal cracks I could exploit for splitting. I do not doubt for a second that a stronger person wielding a heavier and sharper maul could waltz on by and split these without a second thought. I’m not there yet, so my take on it is, yeah! Ok, fine I’ll set you aside for now. Maybe by October I will have the power, or desire to split them myself in a second attempt.

My current pile is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger still. If I make the effort tomorrow I might just exhaust the supply around pile one. Which isn’t really a problem per se. I had hoped that more of it was ready to go, but half of it is too long. I can’t be arsed to split logs that are over thirty inches long. I can barely roll them, and have zero chance to get them up on the block myself. Then the chopping angle is way off, practically cutting off my entire swing. So those will get left to be cut down further for another day. There are full four or five foot limbs in the pile, I’m not touching those, and the rest is too new. Very wet, and has no signs of checking or cracking that I need to map out my plan of attack on each round encountered.

At 60-90 minutes a session I don’t really need to go all that hard each time I stop by to split wood.  I’m trying desperately to do two things at once, be helpful, not get hurt, and exercise so I can be proactive with my weight loss. If I can inhibit my evening snacking, and stop pounding multiple cans of pop every single day, I should slowly start to come out on top of this thing. I’m still walking the dog, and working my day job. We’re back into the swing of climbing twice a week, so with any luck, and common sense, I should start to see the numbers on the scale drop slightly over the next few weeks. I do not know if I plan to keep splitting into November. Depends on the piles, and how slow I move through the rest of September and all of October.

I recently had John Scalzi’s new book delivered by Amazon (forgot I saw it and ordered it months ago) as a very pleasant surprise. I have given it a few minutes even though I am technically reading a Jason Pargin book right now (I’m beginning to worry about this black box of doom), but this is thinner, with larger text, and is pretty snappy. I can interrupt one book to read another. I’m doing that with Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, with the Jason Pargin book as we speak. Triple split, it’s like book inception over here. The sooner I finish one, I can finish the other and get back to Mistborn and it’s deeper world building. Which sometimes I love, and other times I just want a story to get rolling without pages upon pages explaining a new world or magic system to me. But I digress.

So that’s my Thursday as of eleven am. Take care out there. Enjoy yourselves. Ciao Bella!