This is what August is supposed to feel like.

Enough of that pre-autumn, that cool breeze, that chill. If I'd wanted to be reminded of impending Winter I'd have spent the Springtime in Australia.

Lazy hazy days with a great excuse for jumping into the pond. Sitting still and sweating. Watching smoke rise vertically from a pipe. Dogs passed out in the sun like a couple of solar panels, soaking it up.

I got my run in before 10 AM this morning, 4.5 miles, facing down the rising sun on the power lines. Flushed and glowing like a furnace. I'm used to sweating through my shirt, but I think this is the first time I've ever sweat through my shorts. 

And gosh did it feel great. 

Man, I have got to move someplace warmer.

I've got about two months to figure out where, and how.

First Mow of the Season and Other Improvements

 We've had gorgeous weather around here, finally. I got a bit of a sunburn on my arms. The other day we cleared out a couple of poorly looking shrubs in the front yard. Fired up the lawnmower for the first time this season. It took a while to rouse it from its slumber but it got the job done.

While I was working on that, The Wife was putting up fence panels to re-define the yard and open up some of our limited space. Then she made this garden pond/fountain/seating spot.

And because it wouldn't be this blog without at least one photo of a woodpile...

In all we've got two cords stacked up around the place, more than half of which is timber that fell on our quarter acre or at my mother's place. I'm working out a deal with a co-worker for some coal she wants removed from her property. So it looks like our heating needs for next winter will be all attended to.

Hey, it's nice to know we can plan ahead for some things around here.

Me and My Chainsaw

Because this blog is now exclusively about cutting and gathering wood, apparently.

The other day I worked the split shift and thought I'd save some gas by hanging around at mom's place (closer to work) through the middle of the day. I planned to cut and split some swamp maple that fell during Hurricane Sandy. My sister is minding the place while the folks are gallivanting down in Florida for the winter. I brought my chainsaw and a change of clothes but forgot to take working shoes. Carrying the saw to the car in the morning, I got a drop of dirty bar oil on my new Bucks and so will likely be looking at a black circle on my toe for the next 18 months, unless this pair wears out quicker than the last one.

I found a pair of The Captain's boots in the basement, only four sizes too big, and used those to tromp around the yard. The physical discomfort was nothing compared to the irony of being literally unable to fill my stepfather's shoes.

Looking around the place I found the two huge pines that had fallen from our yard across the neighbor's path during blizzard Irene. I know the folks don't get along with those neighbors too well; they're unhappy with the barking dogs and the two 30' + boats parked in the yard, and they complained when The Captain built a shed 15' from their property line. This led him to hoist the shed up on some logs and roll it across to the other side of the house, pulling it behind his truck. He's pretty spry for a man in his 70s, and he'll be helping us with our roof in a few weeks. It didn't seem right to leave him with this extra task when he got home if I didn't have to.

My sister was nervous about the fact that the neighbors had made some early attempts to trim off some branches so they could duck under the tree and make it to the pond. She was convinced they'd come pounding on the door, doing their best to make her uncomfortable. "But don't go cutting it up," she said. "You'll wear yourself out."

Sounded like a challenge to me.

After my sister left for work, the oil-delivery man came. He watched me studying the tree. "I'm trying to decide if these are safe enough for us to tackle or if they need a professional," I told him.

"You can do that," he said. "It's pine, so it'll cut easy." But his eyebrows went up when he saw me bringing round an electric chainsaw. Electric powered chainsaws are for lightweights, apparently. "Oh I get it. It's for conservation," he said, referring to the fact that agents of the conservation commission tend to come running when they hear a gas-powered chainsaw running anywhere close to wetlands.

There's a real cloak-and-dagger aspect to yard maintenance around here.

I brought The Captain's big stepladder over from beneath his boat, trying to decide if I could cut it from above without it knocking me over. But as I thought about it, it started to feel like too much extra work and danger. So I ended up starting at the base. The bigger trunk was over 20" across, quite a bit longer than my saw blade, so I went at it from one side and then the other, stopping when I heard the weight start to pull it apart. I was lucky the stump didn't spring up and hit me in the face. Eventually the trunk fell and landed across the stone-wall, at a height I could cut at from the ground.

But it's dangerous cutting at a tree from the base, with all that weight bearing down on you from above. Better to chop up a tree, even a fallen one, from the top down. But there was a lot to that top, extending far into the neighbor's swamp, and I knew I wouldn't have the time or the energy to take care of all of it. I just wanted to clear the path and do my part for neighborly relations. So I made the best judgments I could, at first alarmed when I felt the bar of the saw start to bind in the wood, then approaching more carefully when I realized what was happening, and the forces of all that weight bearing down.

The whole process had the element of danger to it, which made it all the more satisfying--like a Sudoku puzzle that could crush you if you put in the wrong number. I love tasks that are safe when you think about them, but deadly if you get stupid, like sailing and flying. If I ever get more than a little money set aside I'll be doing both of those again.

At one point the tree collapsed into my cut. Thousands of pounds pinched together, bringing the saw to an instant stop. There was no way I was going to get it out. So I fetched mom's smaller saw from the garage, an even lighter-weight model, really just meant for limbs and brush. I tried to take care of some of the branches that were holding up the top of the tree. The middle was lying across another tree-stump, and I hoped that if I could make the top of the tree fall away by taking out its support, the halves would separate apart and free my saw. But then the weight of one of those branches collapsed onto that saw, and I was left scratching my head and looking at two trapped chainsaws. Rehearsing my phone-call. "Yeah, mom, I was trying to do you a favor but..."

Then I found a hatchet in the garage and went to work with that.

Hacking at a tree with a small axe is hard work, but at least an axe isn't likely to get trapped in the wood the way a saw-blade will. Eventually I was able to knock the branch off of the smaller saw, and then there was a good hour of further consideration and cutting before I got the main trunk of the tree to fall and free mine. It took another hour after that before I could get it into big pieces that would roll free of the stone-wall and that stump. Cutting big vee-shaped wedges from the top and bottom seemed to help. I did the bottom cuts first, so that I didn't have to be underneath the tree when it finally let go. And now that I understood the forces I was dealing with, I was always quick to back out of any cut as soon as I felt the pressure of the tree threatening to trap the saw again.

After that it was a matter of cutting the trunks into sections light enough to lug over the stone wall to our own yard. "Light enough" is, of course, a matter of perspective. I got most of them out of there, leaving just two segments that were too thick to cut through, at least with the energy I had left at the time.

A sensible man would have taken a nap after that, but I was mentally fired up and so I brought my equipment around the house to the wood-pile of maple I had actually planned on tackling when I woke up that day, and set to work cutting it up into lengths suitable for our tiny wood-stove. I wheeled the electric wood-splitter out of the shed. Mom's had that Craftsman splitter through 30 years and three partners, and fortunately The Captain has done a nice job of keeping it well greased up.

Good thing, too. There's no way I'd have the arm-strength left to swing a maul at that point.

It's just as much fun to use that splitter now as it was when I was a kid. You put logs on one end against a stationary wedge. Throw a lever and an iron pusher bar forces the log against the wedge until it splits. When it's half-way across you can put a log against the wedge on the other end, and when the bar's all the way across you throw the lever in the other direction. What a satisfying gadget! I worked straight through my nap-time, and got through three quarters of the pile before it was time to wash up and head back to work.

It had been a high-drama day at the office, apparently. Mis-communications trickling down through all levels, fowled projects, grumpy customers and low morale. Fortunately I was too tired to give a crap. I felt like the guy in Fight Club, who goes into work all beat up and discovers that the volume of the usual bullsh*t around him has dropped to near inaudibility.

It's a perfect state to let people vent it and forget it.

Maybe someday I can buy a little wood-lot somewhere, and treat it as my personal fight club. Or I'll get a truck and advertise a small-scale wood-clearing service. It's good therapy.

Clearing and gathering firewood is like going to a gym that pays you.

Sharpened, Cut, Split, Stacked

I finally got that chainsaw blade sharpened. Turned out it was easier than I expected. A little round file, fits right in the groove, ten or twenty strokes and you can see a new edge shining. The chain for the 16” bar on my Remington Electric Chainsaw had about 20 teeth to sharpen, so I was done in half an hour. And the instructions for doing this were on the back of a package of chainsaw-blade sharpening files, available from Harbor Freight for $6.99.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you read the directions.

Thus armed, I was able to chop up that tree-top that fell during the winter storm. Thank God for that sharp blade. The tree turned out to be about 20” in diameter near the break, so that I had to come at it from one side, roll it over, and then cut again. Locust wood is remarkably hard, but the saw made its way through steady diligence.

Fortunately the wood is as brittle as it is hard, which makes chopping it much easier than I expected. My mother has an electric splitter at her place, but so long as I was having luck it seemed more satisfying to do it the old-fashioned way, swinging a maul.

A few days later (today) I took down a few branches that The Wife has wanted cleared out of the way. Four from a massive maple tree in the back yard, and the bottom branch from another locust out front. This last I was a little nervous about, as the tree is close to the main street’s power lines, and our house service passes through some of the upper branches. But after a great deal of care, inspection, consideration, and planning, I was confident that this one would fall clear of all wires and went ahead, notching the bottom of the branch first so that it could make a clean fall straight down.

Success!

Should have taken more pictures of the process, but I’m awful about taking time out for photography once I’m on a task, so my pictures are usually results-only.

So, there will be a little more sun falling on the garden out front this year, and we’ll have a much brighter back yard as well. Plus, all of this fallen timber has come to well over half a cord so far, which means we’ve saved about $200 on next winter’s heating costs. I got the locust all stacked up for curing (although I understand that it doesn’t require much) and the Maple will follow shortly.

It’s hard work and my back is sore, but there are few tasks out there more satisfying. And I’m sure I’ll be sleeping well tonight.

Hiatus & Effects of Gravity

Surviving Winter Storm Nemo

 

Angry Skies and Best Laid Plans

 

I rather like the look of the IBM Selectric typing across a paper bag. It’s a vibrant contrast of the precise over the rustic. Strangely, I’m finding I get better results from photographing my typecasts than scanning them. The scanner seems to reflect white light around the indentation of the letters, which wreaks havoc on my post-processing efforts to increase the contrast and make them more legible.

There are times when the whole process strikes me as silly. And yet I keep doing it.

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Ha! Just heard that they’re shutting down public transportation in Boston at 3 PM today. I suppose we could have spent the whole storm in the Hilton’s hot tub and swimming pool—but I’d rather save that luxury for a time when we can also go outside and enjoy the city.

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While I was writing this, a ladybug started walking across the top of my monitor. In February!

What a world!

Why I Love My Office

We have a very small house. It’s an antique half-cape that’s 300 years old. There’s not a lot of room. Essentially there’s one big living space downstairs with a chunk taken out for the central chimney, and a kitchen off the back that was added sometime in the 1800s. Upstairs are only two rooms, and you have to walk through one to get to the other—so, if we want to sell it, we can only count it as a one bedroom. There are no dormers, so the second floor could feel a bit like an attic, tight and cramped.

Still, thanks to The Wife’s brilliant design sense, I get to enjoy a spacious second floor office with two desks! Not to mention a giant comfy sofa.

Here’s what you see coming up the stairs. A bit cramped and inauspicious. That big white pillar is the chimney again, taking up space. Not much room behind it for anything but storage. Might as well fill it with typewriters…

Come around the corner, though, and you reach my analog workspace. Lots of room on that big old desk for pipes, typewriters, notebooks, etc. And a previous owner did a nice job installing custom storage along the eaves. (No easy task in a house where absolutely nothing is square, let me tell you.)

Turn to the left and you can see the lounging corner. It’s a simple and masculine hangout spot. I still can hardly believe we got that oversized IKEA sofa to fit up here, but it settles in like it was custom made. It makes a great spot for midday naps, and it’s a comfortable place for guests to sleep.

The IBM Selectric is just the right height for typing comfortably at a coffee table.

Finally, the view from the couch. The electronics get nestled on another desk around the back of that chimney.

That desk was another purchase The Wife made, for my Christmas present back in 1998. It belonged to her boss’ late grandfather, and it was covered in layers of paint. She had it stripped and sanded by Christmas morning, and then we applied stain and a dozen coats of polyurethane. We’ve moved it seven times since then, and it’s the one piece of furniture I’ll insist we take with us if we move again in the future.

The dual monitor setup feels like a strange indulgence. I started with a $130 computer bought from a dump-salvager, and added a budget $40 graphics card. Surprisingly it had a dual head cable, so when a spare second-hand monitor came my way, I couldn’t turn it down. It’s funny how quickly I got used to having the extra screen and how much I miss it when it’s not there. Using a remote-control app on my android handheld to drive my media software, I can watch movies or control my music from the sofa. I may be a cynical luddite but I am becoming a fan of this era’s dirt-cheap electronics.

There’s just 200 square feet in this room, and the way the roof slants in you can’t stand up in about a third of it. But still there’s so much to do up there that I never want to leave.

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How come I get all this lovely space, you ask? Why doesn’t The Wife have some room of her own?

Don’t worry about her. She built an addition off the back of the house, next to the kitchen--almost entirely by herself. And then she built a barn in the backyard.

ITAM Staycation Typecast

 

Overnight Coal Fire Success

 

And if I had one of these, I could stay warm forever!

Burning Coal in a Franklin Stove

It turns out this little Franklin stove burns coal pretty well.

That’s actually a coal grate that it came with, so I was expecting good results. It’s taken a good deal of experimentation and practice to heat with it, though. It’s kind of a hybrid stove, and not terribly efficient. We’d probably get more heat from a stove that sat out in the middle of the room with a pipe coming in at the back. But then we’d have to have a big stone slab in the middle of our floor, lose a bunch of our living space, and risk burning ourselves on the thing when we walked across the room.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The grate is made to sit up a few inches higher than shown in this picture. That would leave more space for the accumulation of ash underneath and make shoveling out a lot more convenient. We tried it that way a few times. I quickly got the hang of burning wood down to a hot bed of cinders before adding the coal, and then layering it up gradually until we got a slow, sustained burn. It burned most effectively with the doors closed and the dampers open on the bottom, so that the draw of the chimney drew a steady stream of air across the fire.

Problem was, the stove never threw any heat that way. It all went up the chimney. The body of the stove remained cool enough to touch. I’d heard stories of people’s coal fires getting out of control and turning their stoves cherry red. Close the dampers, cut off the air supply, said the experts. Be careful or you could burn your house down.

No concern about that here.

What seems to work for us is leaving the grate in the lower position. Then we can pile the coal a bit higher. If I close the doors for half an hour to get it nicely stoked up, I can open them and fill the house with heat for a couple hours after that. The only thing about leaving the grate down is we have to let it burn out at the end of the night, then pull the grate out the next day to shovel out the ash. Messy, perhaps. But it fits just fine with our heating habits.

I’ve read that combining wood and coal at the same time is a bad idea. It releases sulfuric acid and eats away the steel chimney liners like ours. The Irishman who delivered our firewood said they mixed coal and wood in the old country all the time, though, so I couldn’t resist trying it today. Just a bit. It gave us a nice blast of heat. The temperature at the sofa got up to 65 degrees!

It’ll be something I’ll do in moderation. Like smoking.

This coal is a handy way to go. It’s available at the local hardware store, a 40 lb. bag for $8.50. I can pick up a few bags in my Honda and be set for the week. It’s not like committing to a cord of firewood, a propane fill-up of $400, or, heaven forbid, one of those 275 gallon oil tanks that costs over $1000 to fill completely. And I can dump half a bag in there and let it burn for hours, instead of fiddling with logs every half hour or so. Wood fires are fun when you’re in the mood for them, but let’s face it—that’s not always.

Those big trophy houses with cathedral ceilings that were put up in the 90s (I sheet-rocked a couple of them in my ill-starred role as a drywall man’s assistant) cost $1500 a month to keep warm these days. So I’ve got yet another reason to be grateful for my modest little half-cape. Keeping this place warm with electric heat, when it was our only option, ran about $650 a month. When we rented it out to a woman from South Carolina, who didn’t know any better (even though we told her) and she kept the thermostat at 75, (even though we told her) and didn’t put plastic over the windows to stop the drafts (even though we told her) she paid in excess of $850. Using this stove and a couple cheap space heaters for select rooms has brought our electric bill down to $240. Of course, we have no heat on at night, or when we’re both out of the house. It’s cold in here when we come home. But that’s okay.

We’re New Englanders.

Embracing Boredom

I like to be bored. I enjoy having the time to savor ordinary tasks. Building a fire. Washing the dishes. Splitting wood or mowing the lawn.

The embrace of boredom has been the great delight of my adulthood. It has also led to my being not as motivated as perhaps I should be, to lead a more interesting life. I probably should have gone back to school. I probably should have pursued a Capital-C Career. But once I managed to secure a house that kept me warm and a job that met the expenses, it became hard for me to want to stretch beyond that. 

Getting up in the morning and being all right with what you have to do. It's a kind of American dream. Not everybody gets to live it and it rarely lasts forever. But what the heck--why run from it?

David Foster Wallace, who wrote one of the world's most aggressively boring novels, said in his unfinished manuscript The Pale King that boredom made anything possible in this day and age. Wallace wrote a lot, because he didn't live long enough to get a smartphone.

This is probably true.

Here's his quote:

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

On second thought he doesn’t quite have me pegged. I’m not so much immune to boredom as desirous of it.

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I love classical music, because there's a lot in there, but you have to be bored to take the time notice it all. And it doesn't impose itself on you. You want to think about something other than the music? Go right ahead. You want to play it while you read a book? It'll be there in the background. Glenn Gould once said something along the lines of he’d spent his career making the best elevator music he could. 

I like minimalist electronic trance type stuff as well. It, too, stays out of your way. There's not as much to listen for in it, so if you do want to focus on it, you have to sort of make up a story in your head to keep it interesting. You think, this has to be the soundtrack to something. And then you script your own little movie. You can project it on the back of your eyelids. I've had wonderful naps this way.

Smoking a pipe probably sounds boring to most folks too. Bent or straight shape? Birdseye or straight grain? English or Aromatic tobacco? And you mean you have to clean that thing, pack and light it, and then puff on it for half an hour?

Yawn. I love it.

This article at Smithsonian.com is fascinating. In defense of boredom. It refers to the blog of James Ward, I Like Boring Things, which is here. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone.

Sometimes I feel that the internet is robbing me of my own thoughts, whisking me through life before my time. I slow down with typewriters, which only display the letters I press. They are lousy for research but they are great for this other thing which I just made up, called pre-search. If you sit down at a typewriter and start moving your fingers, you bump up against your own limits and discover the things you really want to know. 

You keep those things in mind when you go out into the world looking for answers, you might be all right.

Frosted Window Panes

Here’s what passes for a view out of our unheated kitchen window these days.

Not to keep harping on this, but it’s bloody cold around here.

Time to give thanks for that little woodstove, for The Wife’s persistence in tracking it down, and her further persistence in getting us to install it. Now if only the thing would gather up some wood and light itself, that would be great.

Meanwhile our refrigerator seems to be confused about the fact that it’s job is suddenly to keep our food warm.

Adventures North and South

A wood-fire, the Sunday paper, coffee, typewriter, and (implied) couch. This is the right way to manage a day off.

 

 

Thanksgiving Dinner Preview?

He's handsome. But does he look too good to eat?

That is the question.

If only the bastard wasn't so damned friendly.

Labor Day Anticipations