Yesterday morning I was sitting here with my laptop late in the monring, trying to figure out a game plan for the portion of the day that wasn't already promised to others (coffee with a friend's kid who wanted to learn about financial services careers, get birthday cake, drop something off at a client's house, birthday dinner and presents with Graham, Granny and Matt). Mary came in and said it was supposed to rain soon.
Having run one day and biked the other earlier this weekend, I opted to chop some wood. I had trunk sections from a tree next door which had been sitting around since Mike and Ian came over earlier in the year and cut a tree which had fallen in a neighbor's yard into sections.
It was a good plan. The sections were primed for splitting. The new maul felt great. I even got some work out of this David Cronenburg-esque spike thing designed to be driven into the heart of really big sections that take too much work to split with a maul. You just have to use the sledgehammer face on the other side of the maul. I figured out some techniques, though I'm sure I could get better.
It's the kind of work one needs to take frequent breaks from, so I gathered some branches for kindling and added them too our already bulging piles of kindling (we really need to burn more fires this winter) and flipped the compost. Not so mysteriously, the compost had almost none of the food scraps I dump on it from the kitchen. There's not much of a mystery to solve here: this is clearly the work of the bands of marauding dear in our woods. We have essentially been feeding them. Honestly, I can live with it because the poor things have relatively little to eat, having denuded all the underbrush for miles around. If we can't get our shit together to cull their herds, they might as well have something in their belly so they are less stressed and out of it when they cross the roads. Perhaps by feeding them we save a car or two.
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