In the ongoing project that is clearing the ice damaged trees away from Casa de El Poeta the new chainsaw is taking the worst of it, jumping the chain off the bar at least 5 times requiring bar removal to return the chain to its proper place on the saw. The manual said this was to be expected as well as frequent tension adjustments in the first 10 or so hours of operation as everything “wears in” to where it fits and runs well, and now I’m out of bar oil to keep “wearing in” from becoming “wearing out”. Add the sawdust in my hair from overhead cutting on the live oak and it’s just a mess.
On the subject of that live oak, I could not believe how dense the wood was from that tree. I could barely carry a foot long chunk of limb not even as big as my arm from the tree to the pile that future firewood is going just a few feet away. I had no problem moving hunks from the ash tree out front that were almost as big, which is more than 3 times as far. I could actually carry two logs of ash from out front easier than one of the live oak basically 10 feet from the tree to the driveway and another 15 feet over the driveway. I know oak is heavy but for some reason I figured the evergreen version would weigh less than the deciduous tree.
Mrs. the Poet is concerned that our tree may have damaged the fence that was taken out by excessive rain and soft soils back in the summer. I say the entire fence was destroyed in the summer, just not all of it actually fell down but she says, “Fair is fair and right is right” and if our tree damaged the still-standing parts of the fence then we should help pay for it. I find it amazing the things she wants to pay for now that I have a little money…
And I’m taking a lot of cordless tools and lights to church tonight because the ice storm took out the line from the pole to the breaker box at church. The big problems are that the breaker box is no longer up to codes and basically everything needs to be replaced before we can get our power hooked back up, since the breaker box came off the side of the building when the power line went down. I’m not sure how many times this makes the main panel being replaced, because I know that what is now our church was originally a duplex with a fusebox (or 2) instead of a breaker panel when it was first built in the early 1950s, and the breaker box we have now looks like it might have been installed back in the late ’80s. From what I can determine from second-hand information had the breaker box not been damaged when the line fell we could have just gotten the power hooked back up and called it a day as the existing box would have been grandfathered in.
And as the Icepocalypse fades into memory the high temperature for today appears to have hit 61°F and stayed there for over 2 hours so far, practically t-shirt weather after all the freezing we did last week. That means even though the lights are out at least we won’t freeze at church tonight while we make and charge our Yule Log.
And that’s all that comes to mind about things to be written about today, back to death and wanton destruction tomorrow.
PSA, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 