A day at the farm II

Reprise; pot-addled hill-billy buys 2,000 piece socket kit so he’ll never lose a socket again, only to lose the entire kit.

So there I am, undoing those 5/16 nuts with an adjustable wrench, which I can only move a quarter turn at a crank, and there’s about two inches of threaded rod to traverse, so this takes the better part of the afternoon.

With each quarter turn I curse the Farm Manager, because deep down I know that the reason I can’t find those sockets is because she moved them. She may even be telling the truth when she says she hasn’t seen or touched them… a woman can totally move shop tools out of her kitchen without being consciously aware of what she’s doing. Some primal urge kicks in, and voila, tools gone and she doesn’t even realize she did it.

Ya, I don’t get it either. It’s like the time I wanted to keep the snowmobile in the living room over the summer. Like, we don’t even use the living room over the summer! We’re outdoor folks in the summer months. And if we did, what would be the problem? It’s got a nice padded seat and even has cup-holders!

I must admit a gnawing suspicion that perhaps the socket kit is in the tent trailer. I just put that away the week before. I’d got it out and set it up back in July, because the FM claimed it smelled “musty” or “mouldy” or something. I don’t know… smelled like a camper to me.

So I let it air out from July to December, and we never actually did spend a night in it, because no matter how much it aired out, the FM still detected must or mould. You know as well as I do what’s going on here; she’s on the war-path to get a new camper.

As for me, I’m strictly old-school. I didn’t even see the need for the old camper, let alone a new one. We’ve camped across this great country from the Bay of Fundy to the Rocky Mountains in a 12×12 tent we got on sale at Walmart. With children! And now that it’s just the two of us and a couple of hounds we need a trailer? Get outta here!

But I digress. My afternoon of battery swapping ended badly. The battery out of the F-150 is for some inexplicable reason and inch taller than the one in the Escape. Why? They’re both Fords. Why not just have one size of battery? I finally had to resort to doing what I should have done in the first place; boost the tractor with the fully charged truck battery.

Get the tractor fired up (again; a Ford, but yet another size of battery) and hook up the trailer I got second hand from Uncle Bruno, (and until I saw it on the trailer ownership I didn’t even realize his name was Bruno… we always called him Uncle Bob) load up the gas can and the oil can and the axe and the Stihl, and head across the road to the south woodlot.

I’m focusing on the south woodlot for a reason. At this time of year, with the foliage off the trees, at a certain time of day when the sun is just right, you can see Bass Lake right from the house! If I cut down all the trees at the east end of the south woodlot, we’d have a lakeview year round!

That’s what the real estate folks call “adding value.”

I scout around for easy prey on the east corner, and by golly I find it! Nice forty footer, crown gone, most of the bark gone, just standing at a nice tilt that’ll let me drop it with a single cut! Forty feet of stand-dried firewood available for the taking!

Let the fun begin!

Tree drops with no drama whatsoever.

I cut that tree into firewood-size sticks. The new chain I just installed is cutting through that trunk like the proverbial hot knife. I shut down the saw to load my wood on the trailer… pick up a long sixteen inches long and a foot in diameter…

My heart sinks. It weighs about a pound… I just cut down a poplar tree. Yes, poplar will burn, but it leaves more in creosote than it leaves in heat. It’s absolutely a waste of time to spend gas money, chainsaw money, and time on cutting poplar for firewood.

Luckily, I’ve gained the maturity to realize when circumstances are conspiring against me. There’s nothing else to do at this point in the day other than cut my losses. Yes, in spite of all the piss offs, I will not be defeated!

It’s time to fire up a fattie.