Doesn’t look like we’ll be needing the ol’ kiva fireplace in the master bedroom for a while, if the long-range forecast is any guide.
Actually, we’ve never needed it, nor the bigger one in the living room neither. We both got our fill of wood-burning Back in the Day®, when we lived at 8,800 feet in frosty CrustyTucky and tossed big chunks of aspen, cedar, piñon, and oak into the Lopi fireplace insert faster than ICE Barbie’s masked goons throw brown people out of the country, only with less horseshit and gunfire.
Here in scenic cosmopolitan Duck!Burg, a couple-three thousand feet lower and more than a few Fahrenheit degrees higher, we manage to skate by with fossil fuels. This keeps Your Humble Narrator away from chainsaws, always a good idea, especially in these dark days. Will he do an injury to himself or someone else? Stay tuned!
The chainsaw always made me nervous, actually. What I liked was splitting rounds with the ax, another implement that should probably be under lock and key for the duration. The chainsaw is long gone, but I still have an ax, a couple smallish camping hatchets, and a few handsaws in case I need to dispose of a body … uh, of some downed limbs! Tree limbs!
Goddamnit, this is what comes of reading the news of a morning. Some days there just isn’t enough coffee in the world.
But it does look like we will have oddly springlike conditions for the near future, and so instead of burning wood or anything else, I can expend a few calories on the old bikey-bike. And without all the heavy-weather gear, too.
At this rate, an old white guy could find himself browning up enough to get deported. I hear South Sudan is lovely this time of year.
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We had a fine wood burning stove in Los Alamos, right in the middle of the living room. The house seemed to be purpose-designed to let that stove heat the whole place, given the geometry and big open areas between the upper and lower floor. So I was always well stocked with firewood, even going so far as to cut and split my own.
But when we moved to the People’s Republic of Fanta Se, all that came to an end. I gave my two chainsaws, as well as the chainsaw bayonet adapter for the assault rifle, to a neighbor up there. So too with the maul.
Our place in CrustyTucky had a “great room” downstairs, with the kitchen and guest bedroom/bath doglegged into the hillside. Stairs by the fireplace led to the loft master bedroom and bath.
Once we had the Lopi insert installed we kept the woodpile well stocked, because the propane truck couldn’t always make it up our hill in the winter. Hal and I felled and sliced some standing dead now and then, on his acreage and up in the hills off Willow Creek. I also bought occasional truckloads of firewood from the Adamics in Cañon City.
The little Lopi really did a pretty fine job of keeping us warm, even in the grotesque temps we could get when the wind started howling off the Sangres, across the Wet Mountain Valley, and right onto our deck. It helped that the house was almost brand-new and tighter than Dick’s hatband. Some days we had to crack a door to get a draft going before lighting a fire.
Chainsaws give me the fear. After a rare tornado in Martinez, GA, I had a large uprooted pine tree in the front yard to deal with. I borrowed a buddy’s chainsaw and started working with no training. The saw kicked back durning a cut, and it almost got me. I shut it off, returned to my buddy, and called a pro to dispose of the tree. Haven’t touched one since that day.
Chainsaws are not for guys like me, whose minds tend to wander where and when they shouldn’t. I was askeered every time I started mine, always thinking to myself, “I’m already plenty ugly and stove up, and this is a fine way to get even more so.”
Greg Norman, the sweet swinging Crocodile Dundee of PGA golf almost lost his left hand in 2014 while using a chainsaw to clear trees at his Florida mansion.He remarked to the press at the time “At least I can still play tennis.” Happily, he made a full recovery.
Sincerely enjoy your spins on the latest events outside your casa. As a regular cyclist for over 50 years, 25 of which were spent in the retail and wholesale bicycle industry, I sometimes use my two wheeled device as a tranquilizer to cancel out the detritus that flows out of DC. Been doing that since Nixon fled the scene in ‘74. Happy trails!
I’ve got 3 chainsaws at the ready and use them simply for clearing deadfall these days. NO ladder work or overhead stunts. Even so I still wear a helmet with face guard as I too am wary of the fekkers. And back in my first house, where I had two fireplaces, I was afraid of them too. Would sometimes wake up from a sound sleep in middle of the night to check and make sure there were no embers escaped or that the cat hadn’t moved the furniture too close. Yeah…neurotic….