Duct Tape and Baling Twine

August 31st, 2010 | Category: Automotive | Comments (1)

“Only dull knives cut people.”

A dull knife would have done less damage.

“Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”

This one is from the Bible and I am pretty sure it wasn’t referring to knives.

These were some of the things running through my head waiting in the ER to have my finger looked at.

Apparently I can operate a chainsaw on a ladder in the wind, but walking and whittling a stick are beyond my capabilities. We were in the park walking back to the van after soccer, and the stick I was working on slipped in my left hand, and the knife kept going. There was nothing dull about this Swiss Army knife. It was only a one inch gash, but it was quite deep, and gave me an unwanted interior view of my index finger.

I think I answered the “How did this happen?” question at least  four times in the brief time I was in the ER. It didn’t occur to me till later that suffering a knife wound while in a public park doesn’t sound very good in most ER reports.

Four stitches later, a weeks worth of antibiotics and orders for light duty work only for the next few days I was sent home. There weren’t a lot of things on my weekend list that were light duty. Cutting and chopping the firewood logs was now out of the question for a while.

I did find one thing that would qualify and was going to take some time. The interior of our seventeen year old trailer which has served us well for 12 years has been showing its age. The pastel speckled wallpaper has been bubbling up from multiple places inside.  Given the extreme temperature and humidity conditions this trailer is in year round I am surprised the walls look as good as they do.

Tackling the paper on the worst walls first, I found that not all of the glue had failed and in some places the paper was not going to come off. I suppose I could have soaked, it and scrubbed at it till it all came off, but this was supposed to be light duty work only. I just painted over it. One coat of Kilz primer and two coats of semi gloss latex made a huge difference.

The painted over places may bubble up later and need worked on, but for now it looks like a new wall. The hardest part about this job was cleaning the brushes with one hand.

August 30th, 2010 | Category: Home Repair, Travel | Comments (2)

Saturday night, on the twenty first we had one of our freak wind storms with gusts of sixty to seventy miles per hour. There were two very memorable blasts that night at about 10:30 pm that shook the house and had us looking out the windows for funnel clouds. The internet went out, but the power stayed on and the wind died down. Sunday morning I went out to see how things looked. Our roof was completely intact, but the trees didn’t fare so well. Our beautiful, sixteen year old, backyard poplar had a definite tilt now.

Growing only 7 feet from the shop, a ten degree shift North can cause a few different problems.

This branch was actually on the shop in the morning when I first saw it, but the whole tree had straightened up this much when I took the picture in the afternoon.

This sounds like good news but the kids’ tire swing was still on the ground where the roots had heaved up from below. Many of the main roots in the yard were pulled up high, and there was a large hump in the grass around the trunk that hadn’t been there before the storm. One more storm and the whole thing could be crushing this corner of the shop.

The backyard tree wasn’t the only casualty. My daughter was taking care of the neighbors horses that morning, and I told her to pick up any limbs in their driveway from our trees. She came back and told me there were no big limbs, but an entire tree was down across the driveway and into their yard. The pond trees here had a hard time holding on to the muddy loose soil, but we only lost two.

Running a chainsaw on a Sunday morning before church is something I don’t usually do, but I didn’t want the neighbors coming home from their trip to a blocked driveway. Some of the kids and I cleaned it up nice and neat.

The limbs resting on the roof of the shop, were not doing that before the storm.

This poplar was close enough to the grape arbor that the grapes had migrated into it, and for the last couple of years we had been picking grapes out of it with a ladder.

After standing on the shop roof and cutting off all of the limbs I could reach with a pole saw I slid them down over the edge. The dog was not in her pen when all of this landed in there. Standing on the slick, dusty shop roof and sawing off fifteen foot limbs from a tree swaying and towering above me was making me dizzy.

The 32 foot ladder still left at least 18 to 20 feet of tree above it. From that point on the ladder there was enough of a breeze to sway it every direction. That must be what it was like in the crows nest on the old sailing ships.  Most of the limb removal on high was done with a handsaw, but there were a few that  needed a chainsaw.

Some of the larger limbs came crashing down every which way, and there was no way to direct them. This one tried to smash the door out of the shop, but only managed to scar up the jamb. I was just glad it didn’t tumble in through a window.

When the pile on the ground gets bigger than what is left in the tree you know you are getting somewhere.

With all of the limbs off of it, and the trunk cut down to about 12 feet there is very little chance of it falling on the shop and causing any major damage. I cut it down to the limbs that hold the tire swing and the rope swing . For the kids’ sake I left this much standing until I can make a new frame for the swings.

August 30th, 2010 | Category: Just waiting for a category | Comments (1)

Genesis 40:9-11

⁹ So the chief cupbearer told Joseph his dream. He said to him, “In my dream I saw a vine in front of me, ¹⁰ and on the vine were three branches. As soon as it budded, it blossomed, and its clusters ripened into grapes. ¹¹ Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes, squeezed them into Pharaoh’s cup and put the cup in his hand.”

August 29th, 2010 | Category: Bible Verses | Leave a comment