Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  You may recall the Mormon horde that swept through our property two weeks ago, making massive brush piles from cleaned-up deadwood and brush, and ripping out almost a half mile of five-strand barbed wire fence.  In the interim Debbie and I cleaned up and burned all the smaller brush, but a good-sized stack of larger wood remained.  In between rainstorms last week, I sawed up about half of these logs.  This morning, I sawed up the rest of them.  The result is roughly a half cord of 18" logs.  Some of these need splitting, but otherwise it's all good firewood.

About three-quarters of the logs were black willow.  That wood burns hot and clean, but it's relatively soft.  The rest is box elder (a kind of maple), and that wood is hard – so hard that cutting it up made the chainsaw blade smokin' hot, and required quite a bit of physical effort to get the blade to “bite” into the wood.  There was one particular box elder log, about 20' long, that looks like it has been drying out for many years.  I'm going to save the pieces of that one for turning on my lathe.

Now I'm back in the house, recovering from the (substantial) physical exertion of all that sawing.  Plus, it's actually warm outside (about 80°), and that added to the physical impact.  I'm about to help my recovery along by eating some beef stew that my lovely bride just finished cooking.  As soon as she gets the gravy made, it's time to eat!  After I recover from eating that meal, we'll go load up all that wood in my pickup, and then stack it in the shed.  That's the last step to finishing up the work done two weeks ago by the Mormon horde...

Update (4:30 pm)...  All the wood has been moved and stacked.   It turned out to be more like 2/3 of a cord.  With that plus the additional half cord or so that my neighbor is giving me, I should be nice and toasty in my office all winter!

The beef stew was delicious, by the way.  You should have been here!  There are some leftovers, but they'll be gone long before any of you can get here :)

After all the hard work today, we decided that we felt like ice cream floats.  We just got back from a jaunt to Ridley's, where we got some Americana sodas and some Tillamook ice cream.  They're in the deep freeze now, and in an hour or so we're gonna have us a good old fashioned ice cream float!

Update (6:30 pm)...  Those ice cream floats (I had vanilla bean ice cream in black cherry soda) were every bit as good as we were hoping.  Yum!  Now for a walkie with  the doggies, and we're off to bed.  I suspect I'll sleep well tonight...