The moon and stars aligned to give me the time and opportunity to acquire more free firewood. I’m delighted!
Aside from beer and bacon, there isn’t much that’s better than free wood. This has been a good year for acquiring free wood. All the firewood I have is free (except the stuff I bought)*.
I thought the season for squirreling nuts away had passed. By now it’s usually the season for sitting around the fire looking at the dwindling food supply and wondering if we’ll live until spring. (Hunting panned out well this year so no complaints there either.) This is usually followed by the season of being driven stark raving mad by cabin fever. (If left untreated, cabin fever can result in maladies like ice fishing and bar stool sledding.) But lo and behold the weather held and I hauled a few more loads in. Huzzah!
By the way, this is not a high tech operation. The process consists of me, my saw, my truck, my splitter (all hail the wood splitter for it delivereth us from misery), and the most important firewood gathering technology of all Ibuprofen.
Self-reliance; thy name is wood stove. Here’s a hint. There is nobody at the Occupy Wall Street protests both willing and tough enough to stack wood. So there is nobody at the Occupy Wall Street protests who understands jack shit.
I’ve decided to upgrade for next year. I’m going to sacrifice my tractor on an altar** and implore the mechanical gods to grant me something that can handle rougher terrain.
If you don't want to see two of these battling in an arena you're not a man.
Also I’ve decided to explore art in the form of stacked fuel.
This is to 4' x 4' x 8' as Jimmi Hendrix is to a kid with a kazoo.
Now it’s time to sleep like the dead because I’ve worked like a dog. Which is ironic because my dog hasn’t worked a bit today. (Slacker!)
A.C.
* Yeah it’s a tautology, deal with it.
** No I’m not.
Here in South Dakota the price of corn and soybeans has farmers bulldozing trees like it’s a spectator sport. Even though plenty of people in my township have wood stoves and fireplaces I’ve seen tree-piles over an acre in size lit off simply because, well, I suppose they wanted the extra acre of corn rather than the extra heat in the winter.
Money makes people do foolish things. The price of heating your home is the same no matter if you’ve $50 dollars in the bank or $50 Million dollars, but I’ve noticed that once people have more than a two-month supply of money on hand the thought of saving money dwindles.
– Max
Regarding extra wood, I’ve found that a wood stove in my machine shed is second only to bacon when it comes to providing winter comfort. Starting the tractor, waiting around while it warms up, moving snow, performing maintenance, etc… are all made all so much easier with a wood stove nearby. I plug in the tractor, light the wood stove, and put the old enamelware coffee pot on.
By the time my hands are frozen and my beard is covered in ice and I’m half-done pushing snow, I’ve a hot cuppa ready to enjoy, a place to warm up, and a place to dry my gloves. Should the estrogen level in the house become overbearing it only takes a few minutes to stage a strategic withdrawl to the machine shed where warmth, a radio, and some beer may be found.
I thought of heating the garage, but that’s too close to the house to be useful for me.
– Max
I would totally dig a wood stove in my shed. (*&^%$%$$ insurance worries have scared me off so it’s currently unheated. I have other outbuildings though…one of which is toasty all winter long…so I have an escape hatch.
http://www.portageandmainboilers.com/index.html
I think this is something you might be interested in. Outdoor wood gasification furnace.
Fire it in there and run underground pipe to each building to heat them all. Yes, too much fancy electrics, but on the positive you can do several buildings and not worry about an unattended fire in one of them.
I want to stick a system like this out on my farm when I start building a new shop.
I so want that legged lumber logging thingy… I don’t even have a fireplace, nor a place to cut wood, but I really really REALLY want one of those!
Please Santa!
Unfortunately nobody is that good. Santa reports that I don’t get a cannon (which would totally rock as a way to keep raccoons out of the chicken coop!) and you don’t get giant fighting robots (which would be better than a truckload of cannons). Life sucks that way. Luckily a man can be happy with a 27 ton woodsplitter and an antique tractor…it just makes the logging slower. You don’t have to install fireplace first. Cut, split, and stack…first comes muscles, then comes the woodstove.
Wait, I think one needs to be a Japanese teenager with blue hair and serious emotional issues to make a piloted robot work properly, or so those funny asian cartoons seem to indicate…
Only if you want to perform the “glue six robots together and magically everything is more awesome” maneuver.
I definitely want to see two (or four) of those in an arena. Congratulations on being lucky this year!
I’ve decided that the logging robots should have a laser guided bee cannon. It just makes sense.
Pingback: I Don’t Care If You Hang Up, But Drive | The Adaptive Curmudgeon's Blog
> If you don’t want to see two of these battling in an arena you’re not a man.
LOL!