This was supposed to be posted yesterday but I lost internet in the middle of writing so I had to rewrite it today.
I’ve been keeping busy doing chores around the place. There’s always more stuff to reorganize or clean up. I haven’t tackled more repairs because I’ve been waiting for Susan to reimburse me for the last stuff I did. But fixing the rest of the electrical system may not end up being to expensive so I may just go ahead and do it next week. Mostly I’ve been job searching. Well, the searching part doesn’t take too long, but customizing my resume and cover letter for each job that apply for takes time.
Yesterday I noticed that I was getting distressingly low on wood. It has been getting warmer lately, with highs in the 50s and occasionally 60s, but it still gets down near freezing at night sometimes and whenever a storm comes through the temperature plummets.
All that Fir that I spent so much time tossing up the ravine and then carrying up to the house didn’t last nearly as long as I’d hoped. I’ve heard Fir described as a hard wood, and certainly it is a lot harder than Pine, for example, but it sure does burn a lot faster than the Madrone I burned for the first couple months. So, yesterday I went out and got a bunch more wood.
As my mother pointed out (after looking at my pictures on Flickr), this whole area seems to have been clear cut a long time ago. There are huge old stumps here and there in the woods. It is easy to imagine that those trees were thousands of years old, but the oldest trees out there now are maybe 100 to 150 years old. Most are a lot younger. The woods are pretty thick, but a lot of it is youngish trees under 10 inches in diameter, all growing very tall and close together, competing for the light. Inevitably, some of those trees lose out on the competition, so there are small dead trees everywhere. Some of them have fallen over but it takes a long time for a tree to rot, so many of those are still sound.
Yesterday I dragged or carried a bunch of them to the driveway. I didn’t go more than a couple hundred feet, but I ended up with a bunch of trees under 6 inches and maybe 30 feet long. One old Madrone stump was almost a foot thick and about 12 feet long. There are bigger Fir trees that have fallen over in the ravine below the house, including two right next to the one Mark cut up for me last year, but they are hung up in other trees and I am nervous about using the chainsaw on them until I get more experience with it.
I set to work cutting up all the trees I’d gathered for firewood and then carting it back to the cabin with my wheelbarrow. It was a lot of work. Using a chainsaw is tougher than it might look. You are mostly bent over while cutting and you should ideally hold the saw off to the side so that you are not in line with the blade in case it hits something and kicks up. So it is an awkward position to maintain and, although the saw is not terribly heavy, you have to grip it firmly and apply pressure while cutting, but not so much that you dig the blade into the ground (or rocks) when you cut through.
So after all that I am pretty sore today, but I have a fairly big woodpile again. That’s a relief because I still expect lots of cold weather ahead. Spring is on it’s way but not quite here yet. I have noticed some bulbs popping up here and there and lately I’ve been hearing frogs in the stream below the cabin. The wildlife thinks it is Spring already, but it still feels plenty cold in the mornings to me. Maybe I’ll go exploring a bit today and see what other signs of Spring are out there before the rains move in again tomorrow.
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