Today was absolutely beautiful. The overnight low was 42 and the high was 74. It was mostly sunny.
First thing this morning I drove steel fence posts at the corners of our property. The corners were all staked with rods driven almost flush with the top of the ground. The rods had colored tape on them at one time, but most of it has disappeared. Doug had shown me the back corners a month or so ago. One of the front ones was easy to find, there was a stake driven in next to it, but it was just dumb luck that allowed me to find the other corner. I knew I was somewhere near where the corner had to be but was headed back toward a fence line. My shoe was untied and as I knelt down to tie my shoe I saw a piece of the old tape that had come off the rod in the corner. The rod was only about a foot from the piece of tape.
After locating the corners I ran 2+ tanks of gas through the weed eater. I never got more than 75 feet from the house. Basically I trimmed around the area that I mow. I did get rid of the bamboo that has already come back up in the area where Kathy cut it down in late June. It was already 18-24" tall. I may get around to mowing tomorrow.
One interesting thing was seeing the wild roses that are in bloom. They must not know that it is mid-Oct.
I hand split some chunks (5 or 6 pieces) of wood that I had stored next to the wood furnace shed. I don't know the species of wood, but I do know that it is TOUGH! I was not able to split one piece using just the splitting maul. I had to use a wedge on every piece. Not one of the pieces split until I drove the top of the wedge well below the top of the chunk of wood. These pieces are around 27" long. Our furnace will accept up to 30" long pieces.
This is the 11th day that we have had the wood furnace running. It is just idling. Kathy said the heat came on once early this morning. While we haven't needed much heat the past few days it has been pre-heating our water before it goes into the water heater. The water heater that we are using is electric. Using the wood furnace to pre-heat our well water should help with our electric bill. When "idling", like it has been, the furnace takes very little wood.
This afternoon I decided to cut down a "dead" tree. It turned out to be a far bigger task than I had anticipated. It looked to me like the tree would fall directly toward the utility pole that supports our transformer. It was 30 paces from the pole to the tree. When I finally got the tree down there were limbs on the far side of the pole. Fortunately the tree did not fall directly at the pole. The limbs missed the pole/transformer by at least 5 feet.
I had put a new chain on my saw just a couple of days ago. I thought it should cut through the tree like butter, well...maybe not like butter. Instead I almost burned up the bar on my saw before I got the tree down. I keep checking to make sure the chain oiler was working. It always was, but the chain sure seemed like it did not want to cut.
The stump measured 24" in diameter. I was a little leery about which way the tree would fall. After cutting out the notch, and cutting a good distance in from the back, I thought the tree should have fallen. I ended up driving two wedges into the saw cut. After driving the wedges well into the sawcut the tree still did not fall. I cut some more, drove the wedges in further, cut some more and drove the wedges in further. I ended up with both wedges driven full depth into the sawcut before the tree finally fell. You can see how little of the tree was uncut when it finally fell.
I took a much needed break after the tree finally fell. While resting I tried to "touch-up" the chain. I went back and tried to cut up some of the limbs. The chain just did not cut well. In the morning I'm going over to the hardware store in California. I will buy a new chain and drop off my the two dull ones to be sharpened.
In another vein. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I had "locked up" my old Stihl saw, and that I had purchased a new one. When I went to Tennessee to pick up my tractor I took the old saw to my brother-in-law (the same one who gave me a couple of days of his life while fixing up the trailer I bought to haul the tractor). He likes to "tinker" with things and said that he would look at the saw some time, out of curiosity. The local Stihl dealer had told me that the saw was probably not worth repairing. He thought I had seized the engine because I had not shaken up the gas can to mix the oil and gas prior to filling the tank. Tom called me over the weekend so that I could hear the saw run. He had started taking it apart and before he removed the clutch he thought the engine had some how "broken loose". He wasn't sure what he had done, he just knew that whatever had locked up the engine had broken loose and that after putting it back together it seemed to run fine.
Lydia was over for awhile this afternoon. Kelsey didn't have to be to work until 7 PM and Andy was working late. Kelsey came over about 5:30 and spent a little time here. I think Andy finally got here around 8 PM. I'm not going to go off on a rant about this but I am going to mention how unfair it is that there are far to many people on the government dole who are being supported by taxes collected from responsible young couples like Kelsey and Andy. Why we, as a society, continue to accept the irresponsible behavior of people who shuck out kids (because they are to lazy/incompetent to use birth control) is beyond me. It should not be the governments job to punish couples like my granddaughter and her husband and then use those tax dollars to subsidize the irresponsible.
Good night to all. May God bless you and yours.
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