Whether it’s your fingernails or toenails it doesn’t much matter. If you want a comfortable climbing experience, trim down your nails. Your fingers need to be done so that if you are pressing down really hard while you dangle from an extremely narrow ledge you don’t pull your finger nails off under the pressure of your body pressing down on the cuticle. It hurts. Don’t do that.
Also if you would like your soul crushingly tight climbing shoes to not leave you hobbling around, you need to cut your toenails otherwise the pressure of the near constant squeezing will make the inner most portion of your cuticle separate from the toe nail bed, and you’ll end up with bloody socks, and red blood filled lines across your toes.
Just a handy-dandy guide to having a much better time up on the walls, or while bouldering. You’ll know super duper fast if you have forgotten this rule of thumb. So, now I’m going to go inspect my fingers and toes, and get those lined up nice and tidy. Then it’ll water bottle filling time, and eating a halfway decent breakfast.
Causes can get gnarly if you climb enough. My soft hands aren’t there yet. (Fig 1.)
My right elbow is not very happy with me right as of this second, but I just about finished all I can do here at pile one. Next week we move on to pile two, the “we” being the dog and myself. Though next week we’ll be out in the open and not shielded from the sun by a gigantic walnut tree. Let us hope the temperature drops just a little. Not too much, but to hover between 18°C and 23°C is perfect for physical exercise outdoors. Perhaps a slight cross breeze might be of service. A boy can dream, can’t he?
Every day I add more but the pile doesn’t seem to grow! (Fig 1.)
My chopped pile doesn’t seem to grow much at all. I guess it’s spilling over to be a wider, but lower pile. I have to throw the pieces somewhere and lobbing them up over a taller pile seems like a waste of arm strength. I’m here building up shoulder, arm and grip strength, not trying to improve my shit out skills.
I’m starting to figure out what I need in order to continue on. More drinks was a big one, not just for me, but for the dog too. A plastic bowl for his water was a must. I did it out of a bark boat, but that seemed unnecessarily cruel. And at least one snack since I haven’t been having breakfast until 11:00 am. Or maybe the snack itself is breakfast. Either way — definitely need some food stuffs on hand to keep my attention on wood splitting, and not a growling stomach. The dog has his treats from our walk so he’s all sorted.
Now I’m going to stop until Monday because rushing through all of this wood isn’t going to do me any good. Then I’ll just have to sort out another physical chore to keep me occupied until work picks up in the fall. I’d turn my eyes back towards golf, but that requires spending money on tee times, golf carts, balls, tees, and beverages on the courses. Not that I’d turn down an offer to go whack a few for a morning, but it’s belt cinching time.
I’m going to go ice my elbow and have a shower. Take care out there. Ciao Bella!
Actually brought my 4 lb hammer to help dislodge me from sticky rounds speeding up the process dramatically. (fig 1.)
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.
It’s good so far, you should read it.
So that’s my Thursday as of eleven am. Take care out there. Enjoy yourselves. Ciao Bella!
Making headway on pile one of three of properly seasoned wood. (Fig 1.)My trusty companion protecting me from squirrels, skunks, and turkeys. (Fig 2.)
I started with about an hour on Friday morning, and I did get a number of rounds split, so I felt that was a success. I said I was going to start, and I made a pile large enough to be seen from the lane. Then my bicep began to ache and I had climbing 24 hours later so I stopped.
Today I managed a full 90 minutes of splitting, and my bicep is once again singing in pain for my troubles. But less so. I thought after climbing last night without it hurting I was going to be able to get through today’s chunk of splitting without any problems. Not so! But I gave it a rest before I aggravated it too much, so let us hope that when I go back tomorrow (weather/work permitting) I can keep my arm from wanting to fall off.
I think I tore some of my bicep a few summers ago when I pruned the top 8 feet off of the back hedge row. I did two inch plus main trunks with a cheap pair of loppers meant to do inch, inch and a half limbs. My god did my one arm hurt for weeks after that. Now with vigorous exercise that bicep gives me a wee bit of trouble. I just didn’t want to have to hold two different cutters, and a hand saw, and my hedge trimmers while balancing on a 2ft by 2ft platform. Now my arm aches after I use my bicep muscle too hard. Gotta love aging!
I do not believe that I will get through all of the wood, but it gives me something to aim towards, and I’m getting exercise, and the dog is having the time of his life chasing whatever he can find. Plus this stuff will get burned at the cottage for maple syruping, so it’s a win for everybody. I have encountered a handful of rounds that I just couldn’t split by hand. So those I am setting aside in case a hydraulic splitter ever makes an appearance at the farm. There aren’t many, but after 8-10 whacks with no split, or dents or nothing I am not too proud to just set it aside. They win this round! But I’ll best you yet believe you me. Ha! Fuckers.
The next step will be retrieving bins to load all of this into so that it can be transported north to the woodshed for further drying. Once I move to the next pile over in front of the barn I’ll need to be more strategic because stuff needs to be able to come & go from the ground floor of the barn without being impeded by myself or the split wood. I might just work partially out on the grass to make way for vehicles and the like. I have a few days before I need to worry about that anyway. I’ll give it some thought closer to then. For now I’m shaded under a gigantic walnut tree, and out on open grass. With room to park and work without restriction. It’s quite lovely really. Doing it for free means I can come & go as I please and move at my own pace. Love it!
Finishing up my renewal has taken longer than I’d care to admit. I started writing it out at the beginning of the month, and then sat on it for two weeks because I just couldn’t be arsed to request two long standing family friends to sign off on it for me. But now that I have a mere six weeks until my current documentation runs out, I jumped on it on Sunday morning, and got one sign off last night, and a second done early this morning. Took a break to walk the dog, and then triple checked that I had signed, added payment details, and had my photos and supplementary documentation in order and priority mailed it off at the post office. Now I wait, and hope it goes through without any missed portions on the forms, and then I’ll not have to worry about it again until ten years from now. I’ve known it was expiring for a very long time, and should have done this back in March when it was top of mind. But I had other pressing matters to attend to, so I let it slide. And here we are.
With all expectations that I should get it back in three weeks or so if all goes well. Everybody else is good through 2027/2028. Which means we will need to sort the kids out in another years time. I don’t know why but filling out forms makes me nervous that I have misread something, or failed to sign the document in an obscure place.
Hey it’s Tuesday! And a sunny lovely day at that. We will all go climbing tonight at The Hub, so that should be a lot of fun. I’m all paid up until early November so that’s cool too. Tomorrow after school drop off the dog & I will stick around at the farm to do some more wood splitting. See if I can’t do a couple of days in a row to get through the first of multiple piles. The stack near the front of the barn looks like smaller, and drier rounds. I hope they split easily enough. Maybe after a few sessions I’ll be able to go for more than 45-60 minutes at a time. Not that I need to be spending six hours doing it, as this is for exercise, and to stop me spending money needlessly, not because I’m getting paid, nor am I expecting to get paid for it either.
See if I can’t shed some extra pounds by swinging a splitting maul, and climbing with the girls each week. If I stop snacking, and eat better that might go a longer way towards not being so round through the middle. Ha.
Side note: dog got skunked right in the mouth yesterday evening while I was taking my eldest to taekwondo. So that wasn’t cool. Luckily we had all the skunk out shampoos, conditioners, hard surface sprays and such to wash the worst of it away. Not a fun way to spend an evening, I’m sure.
So this has been in the works for quite some time now. We saw one similar at the first belt testing operation at our current gym, and I thought that it was a lovely way to display my daughter’s dedication to the sport/martial art. It will have taken her a number of years to move up through all of the belts she chooses to do, so it’s a compact way to symbolize all of those years of effort.
Right now she is a red stripe on a blue belt, and will have a red belt, then a red belt with a black stripe to go before she can make it to black belt territory. Plus you have all of those Dabs levels to progress further up in the black belt tiers. If she sticks with it for several more (expensive) years then she can try to get into teaching/instruction at the gym. Or because she’s a great swimmer maybe she will be a life guard, I don’t know, I couldn’t say which area tickles her fancy more. But the important thing is, she has options!
We have room for all the belts. Well depending on just how many black belts she gets to, it might get over crowded on the top tier, but I’ll worry about that in five or six years time. Too early to be bothered by it now.
I made the whole thing out of walnut, but had some darker poplar dowels for the upper pegs, which seems to work well enough. I have screws on the back so that I can add picture wire and hang it from a stud if it needs to come up off the ground. We are in a bit of a transition period where the kids are moving (ever so slowly) away from toys, into devices, electronic games, and hobbies, and experiences. Also clothes are becoming a bigger deal now, more than ever, as they are growing up, changing shapes and sizes, and building their own tastes in what they like to wear. So their bedrooms might fluctuate as they release toys to the younger cousins, or take them to the cottage, which opens up floor space to keep the display on the ground, or if they start to pull down the kiddie posters, drawings, and wall decals, I can put it up over the bed. It’s all a slow moving jigsaw puzzle at the moment. I can’t pin anything down just yet.
I’m also now aware of how much different the sizes of belts are. I may have mismeasured because I based my overall design on the first three belts I found on the top of my daughters armoire, and now I am concerned it isn’t going to be wide enough for her teen year belts that take much longer to achieve! D’oh! Oh well, I know I made some mistakes building this one so if I did it again 8 would make the vertical supports thicker, so that as I dado cut the horizontal pieces into them I didn’t weaken it so badly. I ended up having to cut, and glue two additional pieces to the back of the struts to strengthen them up considerably. As you could audibly hear it cracking, or creaking as I moved it around, just under its own weight. That was a mood crusher hearing that noise so soon after I had glued it all together — pre added strut support.
I’m happy with the medal hangers, I got her gold and bronze medals from the Taekwondo Black Belt World June 2025 tournament up on there, proudly displayed. I found her first medal for outstanding achievement too. And a medal from this year’s Regatta at the lake. Looks cool up on there too.
I had originally planned to use dark dowels to hold all of the belts on, but I soon realized elastic rope was the way to go. Now if it gets knocked, or tips the belts should stay out no matter what. That’s a nice touch in my mind. I am kind of sad I messed up the top plate as I had hoped to router in some words to make it really feel like it was specific to my daughter you know? But I got carried away, muddled my measurements and fucked it up, good & hard. So I had to cut it down. Oh well! Live and learn.
Setting aside 90 minutes for climbing and at least an hour to drive there and back today with my other child. I do not know if she will have any returning classmates this go around. If I recall my youngest was the only returning kid from her class. The other four kids were new to climbing, at least that was the impression that I got, since the parents were hovering, and I’d never seen any of them before. So we will have to wait and see what is in-store for us today.
It’s really gloomy looking right now so that will make being indoors during the early afternoon a whole lot more palatable, at least while we are in the last remaining summer days available to us. Before long the temperatures will drop and we will be looking at flurries, freezing rain, and actual snow. Ugh! I don’t want to think about it right now.
Took about an hour out of my morning to swing my new splitting mail and bust up some old wood that has been sitting on the grass for the last two or three years. Much of the top layer has pretty decent rot to it, enough that you can smell it as you approach the pile, but once I got down to the partially covered layers it toughened right up into good burnable fuel for the maple syrup operation at the cottage. I did run into two rounds that I was only able to partially split, so I set the remains aside for another day. It might require a steeper wedge, or a stronger set of arms. Either way I made a very slight indent on the pile. Only certain spots have been around for more than two years so those are my main attractions. I have no desire to fight with newer wet & heavy wood. My back can only take so much you know. Gotta be selective with where I place my efforts.
Truth be told at my pace of only being able to comfortably swing the axe for 45-60 minutes there’s about a months worth of work on just the really old stuff. Not counting the newer loads the tree services dump here, or the larger sections that need to be bucked into smaller more manageable rounds. Some of these look fit for a milling machine, could get some lovely three foot long boards at two or three inches thick if you felt like it. I don’t, but you could.
I would totally spend an hour or two every day running a saw mill, along with splitting rounds. Work is slower than usual right now, so it would keep me busy, and stop me spending money I shouldn’t just because I’m bored. The dog gets a good long walk, and he can run around freely while I split wood with my trusty new maul. Hell he’d love it if I spent even more time at the farm milling wood, so that he could chase squirrels and bunnies and wander around off leash. It’s his favourite thing! Well, that and being at the cottage with all eleven family members, he likes that a lot too.
I do not have a particularly keen edge on the splitting mail because the weight and the wide angle wedge shape do much of the work. My shoulders and back do the other 50% of the work in swinging with a bit of umph! Behind it. My right bicep gave out first so I figured I should stop while I was ahead of the game. I started. I got my mechanics figured out. It all feels comfortable in my hands. My only injury, such as it is, was a graze from a falling round that brushed my calf & shin leaving a very tasty red rash as a parting gift. I split that round almost immediately in retaliation. Felt good to go after it, little bastard.
At least I know what I can do with myself for the next several mornings while I wait for any paid work to materialize. Plus it helps build up my arm, shoulder and back strength. Might give me a meaningful boost when climbing! Who knows. Gripping all those wood chunks can only help strengthen my hands and forearms, so there is that too. Maybe after many more days of this, and trying to eat better I might see some weight loss, or a shift from fat to muscle bringing my waist size under control. Forget the big back, I’ve got a big belly. One I would prefer to lose and replace with more muscle, and a whole lot less fat.
It will take some time because I can only handle about an hour a day right now. I need to build up some stamina and additional muscle strength to go longer than that. Give it time, and effort and anything’s possible.
Have a great Friday. I plan to reward the kids with a trip to the driving range to whack the snot out of some balls for about 45 minutes. It’s a fun time, and a good way to let off steam. Ciao Bella!
Hard to miss as it was plastered all over the internet. Such is life in the US I suppose. Tough break for the kids and spouse. The day however, moves on.
I snuck down to the driving range yesterday at lunch to whack a jumbo basket of balls and wouldn’t you know it I busted my Taylor Made Aero Burner #3 Fairway wood. Launched the broken head further than my ball down range. Luckily there were only three of us smacking balls on the range so I was able to dart down range and fetch my club head. A nasty break from up inside the shaft. I have attempted a repair using epoxy, but I do not hold high hopes for it being any sort of a permanent fix. I think I might get two, possibly three hits from it before it falls apart. A loss of $75.00 because I bought it used off a clearance demo rack at Golf town. Not only that but I cannot seem to locate the receipt so I can’t even really go and complain about it. At least it wasn’t the full 2015 price I paid for it. But, now I need to find a suitable replacement that has a very similar feel and shape that won’t cost me an arm and a leg. Aw shucks, not another trip to Golf Town! Whatever will I do?
We have made it to Thursday, and the weekend is no longer calling for rain, so that means we can be outdoors for much of the days. I do have my second climbing session on Saturday mid day, but otherwise we can go swim, or ride bikes, roller blade, or ride our skateboards on the newly paved road just outside our doors. The options are nearly endless.
I found out an acquaintance of mine has paid $60,000 to join a private golf course a few kicks from here, not to mention what he pays yearly on top of that initiation fee. He could play golf twice a day every day and not ever come close to having paid that much for local golf, like ever. That’s a preposterous sum of money. For a local course!?! Insane. I like golf don’t get me wrong, but not for $60,000 bucks. I can’t justify six, let alone sixty. Could you imagine? Ha. There are better things I could waste $60K on. My oh my.
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