Puppy tricks and dead elm trees

Took down a couple of dead elms this week, a pair of sixty footers that haven’t sported any foliage for several summers now. One was a straight forward notch-and-cut operation that dropped exactly where it was supposed to.

The other was more challenging. It split into two separate trunks about four feet off the ground, each one a good two to three   feet in diameter. I’d been scratching my head about the best way to tackle this tree for a couple of summers now. The main problem was that once you got about twenty feet up, the branches were so intertwined that neither trunk was going to fall as long as the other was standing.

In prepping for the big adventure I took a run into town to pick up a small jug of two-stroke oil and a new chain for the Stihl. Set the oil on the floor in the back of the car and headed home. Imagine my surprise when I went to retrieve that jug. It had mysteriously disappeared from the floor and was lying in the back seat, neck chewed off, empty. Kept an eye on the pup for a couple of days, and she didn’t seem any the worse for wear, so I assume most of it leaked into the upholstery. I better remember to put down a towel or something the next time I give Bubby a lift to a doctor appointment.

Usually I get the Oregon chain for my saw, but this week I bought something under the “Pro-Cut” brand. Complete shit if you ask me. By the time I’d gone through a tank of gas the new chain was so pooched I put the old Oregon chain back on.

Tackled the two-trunk dilemma by notching the first trunk about three-quarters through. Then I made a single cut slightly higher up through the second trunk. Worked like a charm! The notched trunk basically pulled the second one over, and they crashed to ground together with a satisfying ker-thump.

Now I’ve got practically a winter’s worth of beautiful dry elm firewood on my lawn, and I don’t heat with wood anymore. Luckily, lots of folks around here do, and my neighbour Greg was quick to claim the wood. I think he was also looking for an excuse to put his new Stihl 362 C through its paces. He told me that elms are particularly hard on saw chains because they draw up so many minerals out of the earth that when you’re sawing at night you can see sparks coming off the wood. I don’t do much chainsaw work at night, but that was good to know!

So a day or two after the oil incident I’m in town, picking up the daily paper, and I stop at the vet clinic to pick up a jar of pills for the older dog. The hormone therapy wasn’t working to the satisfaction of the veterinarian and this was a new attempt to fix her incontinence by directly impacting whatever muscles are responsible for it. There’s fifty two pills in the child-proof container, the receptionist tells me. I put the pill bottle in the cupholder and go on with my errands.

I get home and reach for the pills, but the cupholder is empty. New puppy had found the pill bottle, removed the child-proof lid without so much as leaving any teeth marks, and now there were fourty-one pills. A couple of frantic phone calls to the vet, and there we were force-feeding hydrogen peroxide to the poor puppy till she puked everything up.

You’d think that by now I’d know enough not to leave the hounds in the car unattended, but I’ve always been a slow learner. This morning the Farm Manager and I left the girls unsupervised while we had breakfast at Coalshed Willie’s. Did a quick mental inventory and concluded there was nothing they could get into that would cause any harm, but…

Somehow she’d managed to fish my wallet out of the driver’s door side pocket. It hadn’t occurred to me that she could even get her stubby snout in there! Turns out the various bank cards and whatnot were not to her taste and remain intact… the leather wallet, however, is a gonner.