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Tag: manual labour

Might have gotten a little carried away.

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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!

A holiday Monday: The wood splitting extravaganza.

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Managed to step away for a spell yesterday to run the wood splitter for a few hours. Together we split nearly two Cord of wood, with another two left to go. Not going to lie, my hands, forearms, back, hips and thighs felt every second of that work afterwards. Some of it just popped apart cleanly, and others (only a few) were that stringy fibrous mess that doesn’t entirely want to come apart. The reason, you may ask, why are you splitting so much wood? Well March break approaches, and with it comes syrup season. Which means keeping the sap in the evaporator running 24/7 for nearly a full week. Gotta have lots of firewood on hand to keep a three by six foot pan full of watery sap boiling for six or seven days straight. I do enjoy spending some time each year tending the fire, stirring the ice out of the sap buckets, filtering the watery sap, and keeping the levels up in the pan of the evaporator. It can either be windy and bitterly cold, or sunny and almost hot out. Either way the exposed parts of the face are likely to suffer a sun burn, even this late into winter. Hats, sunglasses, and covered clothing won’t help. The sun will find a way to bop your nose, chin, or cheek tops. Kissed by the UV rays from the sun. Unless it’s early morning, most can be done with a beer in hand. Just be mindful of the smoke, and heat & ash from the fire underneath it all.

Not only that but the buckets and spials have to go out into all the Maple trees, and teams will need to trudge through the forest to empty the tree pails into larger sealed buckets to transport back to the evaporator. Where we let the cold weather freeze off the water, and eliminate some hours of boiling, but pulling large chunks of ice out of the larger sealed collection buckets. Then you need to filter out things like bark, bugs, twigs, leaves and such, by straining through a massive cheese cloth sieve. Then into the large pan over the open flames it goes. Gotta keep the flames even under the whole pan. Don’t want a hot spot, and cold areas. Gotta rearrange the coals underneath constantly, and add new fuel spread evenly to keep the fire going. So much fun.

We have benches set up, and lights, and a massive stockpile of wood all within arms reach of the evaporator. If only the wifi could stretch that far, you could watch movies on your phone while working away. I’ve had the pleasure of starting the fire after a quiet night of letting the sap cool off. When it starts to get close you have to slow down, as it can kick off, and go from done to burnt in the flash of an eye. My extended family then drains off the pan into sealed buckets, where they filter it again, and finalize the boil at home in much smaller batches, on propane stoves in industrial sized cauldrons. Still smaller than the pan, but gigantic compared to anything in an average home kitchen.