Okay, so I’ve got this pile of juniper in my yard that either needs to get chopped into stovelengths or dragged back into the boonies, because I’m heartily sick of looking at it. Figured I’d cut it up over the winter, but my improved woodshed full of dismantled pallets worked so well I never even gassed up the chainsaw all winter long.
(Yeah, baby!)
And yet…
Really sick of looking at it. And also I promised a bunch of firewood to Landlady, and here’s the makings of a bunch of firewood. Also winter is pretty much over and I really must get off my underemployed ass now.
So…I mixed some gas, tightened up the chain, found to my delight that my faithful old Husqvarna remains faithful still…
This is my chainsaw. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Dragged out my sawbuck, and got to work. Everything cool so far.
And then I inevitably made my big mistake…
I tried to break up this big stump, right at the start of the pile, with a hammer and wedge. Even made some progress on that, too, before completely running out of steam. I ain’t 25 any more, and I have pretty much been sitting on my ass all winter long.
So now I’m back inside with the aspirin bottle, and the only thing I really accomplished this afternoon was tuning up the saw and getting set to cut wood. Never actually cut very much of it…
Oh well. At least your heart was in the right place, and there is always tomorrow. And the day after that…
” never even gassed up the chainsaw all winter long.” You just lost the sympathy of some readers.
” ain’t 25 any more…back inside with the aspirin bottle” My sympathy. I used to heat with oak. I semi-retired recently.
“sitting on my ass all winter long” And this is a bad thing?
Damn if that doesn’t sound similar to me when I get a bee in my bonnet to do a project requiring decent exertion…I’m a 68 year young cripple who keeps looking at myself as 28…so instead of a day or two it usually ends up 3 to 4 days to keep my internal batteries charged.
Here in interior Alaska we use between eight and ten chords mostly of spruce a year . I’m a couple years older than you and have had back surgery so most years I buy five cords in eight foot logs and just have to cut it up, split it and put it in the shed. My grandson helps with the splitting. I get the rest a little at a time doing wood lot improvement. I’m working on filling my sauna wood shed now so I try and do a little every day as it takes two chords. (That is standard 4 x 4 x 8 chords) Persistence is the ticket.
The amount of gasoline you used in your chainsaw would have burned the bitch in place.
Just saying.
(Or perhaps I don’t understand the quandary.)
Jerry, this is a stump I pulled out while clearing a neighbor’s field for a horse arena. It’s alligator juniper, and if there’s a breed of wood that grows dirtier or more twisted in the ground I hope never to burn it. But juniper is really brushy wood, and the only chunks a real woodcutter would recognize as big enough to call a tree tend to be right down at or in the ground. So the stump is laying in my yard, but it’s not a straightforward job of splitting.