oh yeah I'm in PA

[unicornduke]

I drove down late last night.

it's an unfortunate collision in timing with the start of ncaa women's hockey playoffs and the last weekend of nwhl regular season games. 

but I spent the day in the woods, first picking up split wood and stacking it in a bin. We have been trying to shove more wood into bins by sticking 4 1x1s into the bin to hold more wood. I got my stack about a foot and a half over the top of the bin. this is all small stuff for boiling sap

then I ate a quick lunch and made the trek to the maple hill. my parents had 35-40 mph winds recently and dad was concerned that branches had fallen on the lines. the branches aren't the problem, the lines just stretch, the squirrels are. they chew through lines that lay on the ground, perhaps because they want the sap, perhaps because they're agents of chaos intent on increasing entropy in the universe.

thankfully, there was only three or four down, but I still had to wander all over the hill looking at the tap lines. Sap wasn't running today despite the high temperature because the mountain face is north facing and we had no sun. So it was still chilly. I was also supposed to check if there were leaks in the lines, but no sap running so I couldn't. 

dad is actually out there boiling the first sap of the season right now. they got about 700 gallons of sap last week and they got everything ready to go. it's pretty cool. constant too. dad has to feed the fire every 8 minutes to get the heat they need. He's got a timer and everything. 

after the hill, I went and split wood up on the hill at the home farm. it was decent. 

the ncaa thing came up because RPI (8th in the ECAC and frankly not that good although I love them) is playing Cornell (1st in the ECAC and really really fucking good, they've lost 3 games this year, tied two and won 17). It's best of three. Here's the thing: RPI is holding their own. They played Cornell twice this year in regular season and lost both 5-0 and 8-2. terrible! but last night, RPI took them to overtime and Cornell finally won 2-1. I figured RPI would choke today because they can be so inconsistant. 

I listened to the last period of today's game and I tuned in expecting cornell to have scored like five goals

RPI. shut. out. cornell. 

SHUT OUT CORNELL TWO TO ZERO

I was SO STRESSED listening to the game while on the hill splitting firewood. Cornell put 49 shots on goal. RPI had 6 (SIX) 

Lovisa Selander is just kicking ass and taking names. I couldn't believe it. 

Literal shrieking from me as I worked. 

so that's cool. they'll play tomorrow as the deciding game and I will totally be able to handle it 

NOT

I'm currently watching the Buffalo at CTWhale game and the Whitecaps at Pride is at 7:30.

stress from them: Buffalo, Minnesota, and Boston are all tied for first place and these games plus tomorrow's two will determine who gets first place going into the playoffs. No big deal. That only gets them home ice advantage. 

so I haven't caught up with things today and I will work on it, but also: hockey

Comments

[graydon]

Yay! hockey.

Also, put the axe down prior to any necessary shrieking.

[unicornduke]

lol that would be a very funny image

but we've got a hydraulic splitter on the tractor so no axes necessary! We cut a lot of wood for fall outing campfires and the wood burning stove that heats the house and now the sap evaporator so we invested. Or, dad did. he just got a new one recently that has a four way blade so it can cut a log into four parts. I'm uncertain how useful it really is after this afternoon.

[graydon]

I did figure you would have a powered splitter of some kind, yeah. But the mental image seemed sharable.

Wood just isn't a homogeneous substance; lots of clever approaches to wood processing founder on actual wood, instead of the nice straight-grained conceptual wood that hasn't got any weirdness in it.

A four-way blade would work great for a cheese splitter. Wood, well, sometimes.

[unicornduke]

yeah it worked on some of the chunks I was splitting. It was a bunch of dead ash trees and the parts without spilts or knots and that were eight to twelve inches in diameter split into quarters beautifully.

but I was making tiny logs for boiling so it wasn't super useful. I couldn't manage the height to make the smaller chunks split well. all in all, kind of a wash.

at least the four way was removeable so when I did get those knots, I could take it off and use the regular split

some of the ash split so beautifully that it popped apart when it cut in about an inch or two. I actually popped a piece off the splitter and down over the bank by about 20 feet. hilarious

[graydon]

That would be very dry, very straight-grained ash, then. You could make arrows out of that. :)

When I was wee, the cheap stovewood was elm, because Dutch Elm had come through and killed nigh-all of it. Thankfully (for splitting purposes) mostly not rock elm, because rock elm isn't good at splitting. (I've driven a wedge all the way through a chunk of rock elm maybe a foot in diameter and parts of one bottom corner held on.)

[unicornduke]

lol that's an interesting idea. Maybe I should add fletching to my list of skills........

dad is cutting down as many of the ash trees as he can before they start breaking down. the thinner sections, less than six inches in diameter were breaking down already and basically just broke off into small chunks as I was trying to split.

omg rock elm. "the hardest of all elms" oh boooooy that was probably fun splitting

[graydon]

Oh, it makes absolute sense to cut it; good heating wood and it's just going to rot. (Bother the Emerald Ash-borer entirely.)

Trad uses of rock elm include hockey sticks.

I still have the bit of drill rod I used to drive the wedge once the wedge got below the surface, as it were. Mushroomed both ends. It's just ridiculously twisty and fibrous; no willingness to split at all. Which does probably explain the hockey sticks.