Aug 15 2008

(next day—only because it is now after midnight—page two) Friday, August 15th

     Though I am still feeling mostly rather foolish for having blown the big bucks upon buying the gasoline-powered wood splitting machine, I am enabled to split the knarlier stuff that I could only ignore before coming into possession of this machine. Thus emboldened, I took on a couple trees that were obviously going to be difficult to split by hand, arm, shoulder, back, and lower-body swings of my good old reliable one-manpower splitting maul. When taking on these sorts of unstraight timber in the past, I just sawed thin enough rounds to be able to just stick 'em in the wood stove sideways—I call them cookies. With the wood-splitting machine, I can just ram the splitter right on through; except for those pesky spots where large branches extruded, in duplicate or triplicate, as in spreading. I still saw them into cookies.

     I am proud, pleased, and honored to report that I have split most of the wood with my hand-operated one-manpower trusty splitting maul; now wearing away at its second handle this season. This because I chose pretty straight fat, few-lower-branches, trees; which are the easiest to hand split. The one truly knarly-assed fir tree I did glean, proved one tuff muthr to even split off a two inch thick slice off its edges. None-the-less, I managed to split most of its stringy stingy upper rounds, but will have to use the machine to split the lower fat butt pieces. I counted its rings and you know what? It was the same age as I was, am! Had grown al sideways out from off of the side of the hill it grew up on and must have had other trees blown (or falled) against it, or been partly upset by a big wind and had grown in a triple twist of non-straightness and was easily a hundred feet high, albeit on a rather nasty tilt. I had already secured all of the resource stock for Marie and Jere's stash, and had chosen this tree for my own woodshed's needs. Got the chainsaw stuck in it at its halfway point while trying to get it sawn down short enough to be able to move it down to the road with the truck. Had to go home and get the ax, which did not work very well due to the problem being confounded by two other small trees that this monster old fir tree had wedged itself in between as it hit the ground; with an old tree stump thrown in for good measure. Had to go home again and get my handsaw and that did the trick of getting my chainsaw back out from that mean old log that I was trying to get light enough to be able to: First, get it unstuck from the three places it had got its ornery self wedged between, and then drag that section down to the barn-yard. On the third day of wrasseling this monster log's three pieces down to the barn area, I got it all sawed up into rounds. I only took the fat end's half for me and 'gave' the upper forty feet or so to the piles for Marie and Jere. The older and knarlier the firewood pieces, the slower-burning. The oak tree I falled was a firewood-renderer's dream; in that it was so straight and devoid of lower branches for the bulk of its old fat main trunk that I barely had to exert much force at all to split the rounds with the maul. The oak was for my stash too; having already gleaned and rendered Marie and Jere's stuff.

     Being that truck troubles derailed this firewood detail for almost a whole month, I been busting extra butt to get the requisite amounts of hard and softwood down to within shooting distance of the barn, where I can then proceed at the processing (splitting) at a much more leisurely Adamfriendly pace. Also due to truck troubles delay, I have been leaving the split stuff out in thin layers to take in the sun and ooze out its resins so that they will dry faster. About half of the log sections that I drug down to barn front, I then peeled off their bark to: 1)remove all dirt and gravel stuck to the bark from being dragged across a half mile of hillside dirt road, and 2) to facilitate their quicker drying because of the lateness of the season.

     I have had to put out triple the energy outlay that was my good fortune last year, when logging up my valley yielded me eleven full truckloads of cutoffs, plus at least two cords of hardwoods that I did not have to fall. I sweat more while pressing the chainsaw into the butt of the tree I am killing, than while I am swinging the splitting maul. That I have always stated that I hate small engines, causes me to wonder why it is that I can tolerate the chainsaw, and do tolerate its grinding screams. I still hate the Briggs and Stratten (5hp) motor that exudes a complainy whine as I operate the wood splitting machine, but tolerate it, and only just barely, and only for those knarly-ass kinkier rounds that just refuse to yield to my lusty lunges of splitting maul on a hickory handle. The only other small-engined motor I ever put up with was the same darn Briggs and Stratten motor, but was running a three-inch water pump I had while owning such big boats, and towing others around and around and back and forth, up the creek or down out of a three mile long slough ditch into the deeper and far more navigable waters out in the Petaluma River on a midnight full moon equinoctal highest tide of the year night. The thirty-two feet wide, sixty some odd feet long wooden barge I was towing, out from its four feet deep inner harbor berth—and with the tugboat Herbert drawing (sticking down into the water) six and a half feet! I was so curious to see what the hell I had been forcing the tug to get turned around in at the midnight before, that, no mater having worked the whole damn night through to the dawn and the low tide, I just had to drive back up to Novato at dawn to see what the bottom of Pete's harbor looked like, and try to cess out what, if any, damages I might have plowed the tug through in that frantic, I don't want to get stuck in this bumfuck nowhere dump until the next spring tide at the winter solstice, fully six months away! I blew alotta smoke and abused to tug's finer nature and had to see what all I had dredged up. The mass of massive swirls of piled up mud, interspersed with deep conical shaped holes where the propellor wash had blasted in its fury to get turned around for the mad dash back down this thirty feet wide shallow vee-shaped ditch the three miles to the petaluma River and deeper water. The underwater sides of the barge were gouging out right-angle shaped chunks of the ditch's slopes on both sides as we got our asses out from that threat of six months' solitude inland from where the action was down in the saltier portions of my waterborne environs of those days.

     As you may be able to glean from my rambling on and on, I have been writing. Nothing on the book, per se—not even a file begun—but writing and almost every day, and I think I am beginning to get back toward the getting into of maybe more attempt to polish off a better improved book-writing effort. But not without a lot of trepidation and writer's block type hemming and hawing and procrastinating, as some now experienced in this writing thingy's peskinesses of discomforts, and such, I hesitate to just launch full force into the effort; preferring rather to just poke and poke away at reminescing bits and pieces of stuff I had some experience with and like that there, in hopes that a storyline may materialize from out of the ever-increasing mass of typewritten (and printed out) materials collected and collecting. It is such a vast  undrertaking that I forgive myself regularly for hesitating as much as I do. Think I'd much rather be playing my dobro. Darn thing actually is a resonator style guitar and not a true dobro, but will serve handily for while I need to just learn how to play in that, to me for me, new style of using a metal bar to depress strings at the right places and in the correct or proscribed order, eyc.; not to mention the totally unknown ways and wiles of all the other tunings available to steel guitar players. I have decided that to try to interject other tunings into the mix of my attempt to grasp any proficiency at identifying all of where each note lies and swinging the bar to those particular points over the fret or fingerboard would be too confusing for starters. So, and for starters, I will tune the guitar like I always have: In the standard tuning, and learn first how to play notes that I know exactly where they are on the regular-tuned guitar, and leave the fancier stuff for later, after I have first mastered the workings to my satisfaction—and on and on goes this mindless dribbling off of from within this admittedly addled or otherwise skewed somehow, thinker of mine: My batty boinger just keeps on clanging away in ye olde belfry, peppering the scene with their little smudge ploppings of pure guanno, so high in phosphorous content. I try to write down what I can remember or think of to read over later and maybe get a laugh or two.