I have an important appointment mid day so I’ve had to shorten my usual habits just a hair. No matter. Still walked the dog, and got one hour of wood splitting in under my belt. I’ve returned home and made some edits to a client’s document that was just requested this morning, and soon I’ll hop in the shower because while I only split for an hour, these rounds in the mound are a whole lot tougher and meaner to get through. My split pile continues to grow! Bask in the glory that is my split wood piles!
You can see the darker new wood has its own section now! (Fig 1.)I took these from inside the vehicle because I was in a rush to get home to complete some paid work and get a quick shower in before I head off for my appointment. (Fig 2.)
So I’m up to 13.5 hours in Wood Pile One, having completed the stacked rows of mound one, and the freshly cut rounds of mound two, I am up to my elbows in heavier, thicker, more tenacious hard woods in mound three. I’d personally love to be done up here by October 2nd, so that I can clean up behind the barn and get moving down there. It’s a gigantic mess of weeds, tangles, branches, logs and bucked rounds waiting for some TLC. I will be very surprised if the back lot even looks like it’s been dented by the time November rolls around. There’s just so much there! I could work all winter and not finish it. There’s months of work. And more bucking with my chainsaws to do too.
It’s Thursday. No movement in the waistband not on the scales. I am however getting good at sweating my ass off! On a positive note my boots are comfy. The new laces are working out pretty well. The gel insoles are a nice touch too. Gotta take care of our feet!
Another two hour stretch puts me up to 12.5 over three weeks. This third mound is thicker, more fibrous and a hell of a lot harder to split.
These last rounds in mound three are a real doozy. (Fig 1.)
Was late getting into it and now I won’t get home until nearly noon.
Mound three has a good number of rounds in it. (Fig 2.)Alternate view of the latest wood splitting project. (Fig 3.)
Lastly I don’t typically add video on here but I’m so tired yet satisfied with the amount of wood split I thought I just might do it this one time.
A breezy walk though of my pile of wood shards. (Vid 1.)
Woah buddy am I physically exhausted now. Two two hour days of straight chopping and mallet whacking on my wedges is taking a toll on me. I’m hoping the physical exertion will allow me to sleep better at night too. I do hope it is simultaneously building muscles and shedding some modicum of body fat, but I don’t know. Twelve and one half hours of deep sweaty axe swinging doesn’t seem to have affected the scales at all. My pants don’t fit any better either. I think I eat too much when I’m active as well as when I’m not. I am a “bored” eater. I’m trying to move that over to drinking water as a way to cut down on that bad habit. I think I’m going to need months plural before I start to see any changes to my waistline. I just want my pants to fit less tight around my guts!
Lovely weather we are having this week. Cool in the mornings and sunny but breezy in the mid morning and afternoons. Fantastic for spending time alone at the farm with the dog. I’d love to be able to do this sort of thing deep into my eighties. Add some structure to my day. Get outdoors and enjoy nature. Exercise the dog a little bit. It’s truly great.
Do I wish I had more work, or higher paid gigs? Yeah, sometimes who doesn’t. Everything gets more and more expensive so I’m trying to enjoy what I have, while I have it, and do things that are free, yet rewarding. With a side of muscle building, and supposed weight loss capabilities. Do I have to move up to three hours a day!?! I hope not. 90 minutes to 120 minutes is kind of a sweet spot. Enough to work up a sweat and see results pile up around me, but not long enough to become weary and put an axe through my steel toed boot.
Anyway, there’s a gigantic mountain of logs out behind the barn that I intend to work my way into in October. I have this week and part of next to try and complete mound three of Wood Pile One, and then I can stack the bins and move down to weed whacking the next Wood Pile.
These simple posts won’t end anytime soon, unless I suddenly get flooded with paid work, or I grow tired of chopping and go back to the woodshop for my current furniture build. Stay tuned to find out!
The last piece of bucked wood in the mound. (Fig 1.)
Sharp eyed folks will see I missed three logs when bucking wood back in April/May, but I’m ok with that. I can use my saw to fix that I November.
The mound of pieces are now chopped up. Left the largest chunk for last! (Fig 2.)
Once I got the mound done I tried two test bits in mound three, and one gave way with work, but the second seems unyielding. Perhaps I’m tired after a full two hours of chopping, the most I have done in one session so far this season. Third week. Puts me up to 10.5 hrs in total. I’m both tired, hungry and thirsty. I’ve got one Gatorade zero with me, and a Clif Builders protein bar for a late breakfast after chopping. Lucky for me it’s only 9°C, so I’m not as sweaty as usual, though I can feel it on my face, and my hands/back.
Mini pumpkins (Fig 1.)Same pile new angle (Fig 2.)
Went looking for viable Fair entries on Sunday in the fields at the farm. Found a good number of eligible veggies for both kids. It was sunny and warm and the field was hard packed like concrete underfoot. Not ideal growing conditions. Things looked a bit sparse compared to other years. Oh well. Such is life.
Spent the morning at the Orthodontists office with my youngest. She needs work, nearly five grands worth to be precise. She inherited my mouth unfortunately for her. That means tears and mouth pain in her immediate future. Apologies.
Looking a little dry out there these days. (Fig 3.)
Eat in a timely manner and it won’t matter, but if you’re up to your elbows in your tablet he just might avail himself of your last strips of bacon, against everyone’s wishes. (Fig 1.)
Tell your kids to focus on eating and to do so in a timely manner and what do you get in return, kids watching YouTube shorts and ignoring their breakfast until the dog decides he’s waited long enough and sneaks in for a private munch of bacon right off the plate (which was on the couch and not the table I might add). Then complain loudly how the dog stole your breakfast and now you’re hungry. Wah-wah-wah! I’m not impressed with the dog breaking discipline like that, but I’m also not happy my kids ignored a hot breakfast to fuck about on their tablets and not eating when asked to do so. It grows tiresome, and bothersome. Never awesome.
Which, fair enough to say, but I’m not relying entirely on my shoulders and back for indoor rock climbing. No, I’ve progressed to trying to utilize my legs more and keeping a looser grip on the holds so that I don’t immediately fry my firearms and grip strength mere seconds after mounting the walls. Do I still try to brute force it on occasion? Yes — of course, I’m not that well versed in climbing culture and etiquette so I do make stupid mistakes all the time. Like having a death grip. Pulling only with my arms. Forgetting to shift my weight over a planted foot to maintain position in a controlled manner. Not reapplying chalk mid climb. All rookie/noob mistakes, I’ll freely admit it. Doesn’t mean I’m not having fun though!
It’s Saturday. We’re off to go climbing shortly. And now that I look at things more closely I will need to run the lawn mower over the front and back yards today. Going to work up an appetite for lunch!
Being more active is great. But not seeing any weight loss because of it sort of sucks. But I’ll stick with it to see if I can get any movement on the scales, in relation to my belt, and how my clothes fit. I think I need more than eight hours over two weeks of swinging an axe for 60-90 minutes each morning after a farm walk, and climbing two days a week to see any results. Going back to lifting weights would help but that’s another expense, and more time to be found in an increasingly dense schedule*.
The third mound over here looking a little taste. (Fig 1.)Where I left off after another 90 minutes of splitting today. (Fig 2.)
Before you know it I’m going to need to take a few test swings in mound three of Wood Pile One. I’m sort of afraid either way. One, if it splits that’s a good amount of thick and fairly wide bits to have to break down. Two, it hurts my hands, wrists, arms, elbows, shoulders and back taking a couple good natured full force wacks at it only to bounce off and feel as though I have shattered many bones, sinews, and tendons in my upper body. Honestly I hope it splits, but I’m not afraid to move down to the barn. I can take a day off from splitting to go pull weeds and run my gas trimmer to make it a nicer spot to work in. Full sun exposure in October and November aren’t a bad thing, especially if the mornings start at or near zero degrees Celsius. A little bit of blue skies sunshine can go a long way towards making a cold chore slightly less horrendous.
You know I have to get my beauty shots in whilst I work. I think they work better without me in them. It really sets the scene! (Fig 3.)
Today makes five hours this week, plus the three and a half from last week means I’ve just about completed one whole work day down on the farm, spread out over six or so days. I don’t move terribly fast, but the job gets done. Good thing I’m doing this all for free then eh? Hard to complain about my pace of play when I’m just helping out. Putting a body and a dog on the property so it doesn’t appear vacant. We do our walk about looking at stuff, then I smack the shit out of some cut up logs. Win-win in my book. Both the dog & I get exercise, an ungodly amount of wood gets split after years of it just sitting there. Plus should the world end we’ve got firewood to keep us warm for the first winter at least. Plus we can cook on it too. I think that works out marvelously.
I stay occupied with an easy yet monotonous task at hand, thereby focusing my efforts on productive things, instead of shopping, eating, or room scrolling on this phone. I sleep better at night because of the physical activity. The dog is less of a pain because he has time to explore and wander at his leisure. The farm hands are happy because they don’t have to swing an axe to split all this wood, not only that but they get firewood to warm up the house with or to do their own maple syrup operation.
My one gripe would be that the mosquitoes are still bad, and the wasps in the walnut tree are coming closer to me as the season progresses. I liked being out of the full sun when the days temps still climb above twenty degrees celsius. I sweat so damn much. I wore a headband today and whilst I looked a fool, it stopped my eyes from stinging. So that’s going to continue for a while anyway. I could ad a wrist band too for wiping sweat off my cheeks etc… stop me lifting my shirt to do so. Fat belly and all.
The Rstwing 4lbs mallet has come in very handy. I like that it was gorged as one piece. No neck wobble whatsoever. Short, compact and packs a wallop! The nine inch long wedge has proven itself useful. Moreso than the Fiskars wedge which is maybe four and a half to five inches long I’d guess? I’ve buried that one in a mushy logs more than once and had to struggle to retrieve it. Works well in companion to the much larger Rstwing wedge, and not instead of it. A great side kick, but not the whole show.
At some point I’m going to have to stack some of this wood in those green wire bins. I’m just waiting to hear if any are heading north to get stacked at the cottage and returned to the farm empty. That will alter my plan of attack, otherwise I need to find a wall or some trees I can stack this stuff between to stop it from rotting on the ground over the winter. That’s late October, early November Me’s problem. I’ll not either on it now. I will let the ideas percolate in my mind though while I work.
I could do with running the front end loader to go dump all the waste wood and bark piles that have built up since last year. No point keeping those around to kill the grass. That can go into the treeline to breakdown there. Give some little animals shelter and a place to hide. The bugs inside could feed birds and rodents and such. It’ll do the forest good to have the carbon and wood fibers go rot there. Maybe get some mushrooms, moss or lichen to sprout from out of it all.
I’ve turned in some paid work, now I’ll read and have breakfast. Welcome to Friday. Hope you have a lovely weekend.
It won the Pulitzer so it should be an interesting read. (Fig 1.)
I’ve just started to read Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, and it’s an interesting book. All commas and no periods, and every single new paragraph begins with AND. It’s about world war one, trench warfare and some five undesirable allied soldiers are sent on a task to silence someone in no man’s land that is shrieking themselves to death. It’s a bit verbose, loquacious, and alliterative in places. I’m most definitely going to need both my thesaurus and dictionary to pick up what’s being put down. I thought I had a strong vocabulary, but it turns out, yeah — not so much.
I’m nearing 100 pages in after my first evening with it, and so far I am enjoying it. The main character Cyril Bagger is a con man at heart, so I don’t know if he’s telling the truth or if it’s some kind of von he’s putting on after luring us in. Seems like a neat twist by the author if that’s the case. Bravo if so!
Two hundred and eighty some odd pages of a run on sentence seems like a real task to write. Thankfully it’s interesting, and the increased use of AND kind of disappears on the pages. Although I could see why somebody more refined than myself might be bothered by it. If I tried it it would be a lame gimmick, but in steadier hands it seems to work out just fine.
Welcome to Friday morning. Where would you like your book to take you today?
The spring time bucked rounds are willing to come apart! ( Fig 1.)
I made my way through the last two remaining pieces in my neatly stacked rows and then did a test chop on my spring time rounds and wouldn’t you know it! POW! They split without too much fuss. I’m pretty excited about that. That means I have wood to run through next week that’s all gathered in a single pile near to a bin, and free from obstacles. I can park my vehicle nearby and nothing much about my schedule needs to change or be altered. I might take a few swings at the mound directly beside where I’m digging in now to see if the years old wood will split too. I don’t hold out a tonne of hope that it will come apart, but I won’t know for certain until I try.
The beginnings of another new pile of split wood. (Fig 2.)
Unfortunately for all of you this means that I get to continue blathering on about my hours of wood splitting chicanery and shenanigans. My gloves are soaked through with sweat and I’ve started to wear through several of the finger tips. More importantly though the gloves have saved my hands from calluses and nasty stinging blisters. That’s what matters most. Not that I pick up dirty logs and shit with them, but the protection from the axe handles giving me torn blisters and shredded palms. I did buy a replacement pair of gloves but I like my current pair because they still do the task I wear them for. Plus the finger tip hole means I can operate my phone in a pinch without having to take them off! How handy is that!?!
So now it’s Thursday, and I’ve done another hours worth of splitting bringing this week up to 3.5 hours, and the total tally to 7 hours. If we escape rain tomorrow I might as well tack on another hour just for funsies. I did hear that I may receive a new larger report project next week, so my time spent splitting wood would be greatly diminished until that paid work gets finished. Gotta play ball when you’re finally gifted a pass right to the glove side.
I might try to start running the planer today too. It’s loud, dusty and not all that pleasant of a job. If I’m not mistaken I should probably wait for a cooler day so the dust won’t adhere to me, making me a powdered donut looking idiot in my own driveway. I likely need the whole day to run my five boards over and over again, and again. So I feel it’s too late in the day to start now. I’ll walk the dog, come straight home and then hop to it. I hate getting all set up and then having to stop mid way through. It gets easy to forget what you were making plans for once you interrupt the flow. Plus I’m tired from wood splitting this week.
I should keep both activities separated so that it becomes my primary focus for the day and not just in that moment. I have the luxury to do this so of you may not. I don’t want to be distracted or tired & sore before I start working around the table saw, planer and other life altering power tools. Same goes for the chainsaws and farm equipment. Keep your focus directed on the task at hand lest you lose a finger, hand or entire limb, or god forbid your life. Keep your mind on your money and your money on your mind.
Did I mention that it’s Thursday now? We’ve gone beyond the midway point of September all ready! That’s crazy talk. Next month gets even busier with the Fair, Thanksgiving, my wife’s break week, local voting, and Halloween too. Boy oh boy October is going to fly by at a break neck speed! Prepare yourselves accordingly.
I’ve had to rip my boards down to 11.25 inches instead of 11.5 inches because the board I was using as an 8ft long reference was kicking out along the bottom towards one end causing a taper to appear. At least I’m just off by one quarter of an inch, so not a massive set back.
Once I trim the legs I will likely be closer to 3/8ths lower than the true 34 inch height I had been planning on. But I’m waiting to do all of the planing to finished thickness before I start doing cross cuts again.
At least they all match! Albeit one quarter inch smaller than I had hoped for. (Fig 1.)
With any luck and some on paper planning I can try to complete this front hall storage unit without too many more screw ups, hiccups or mistakes. We shall see.
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