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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Mad Blog Media 
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.
Sharp objects and I have rarely gotten along. Once during college I somehow managed to nail my left bird finger to the drawing board with an X-acto knife. I won’t say illicit substances were involved, but illicit substances were involved. Also, and too, astonishment, disbelief, and blood loss. I can still see the scar 50 years later.
I still use X-acto and Swiss Army knives. I carry a Swiss Army knife of some sort every where I go, and used to keep one in the under saddle bag on every ride, or a bigger one in the pannier on overnight cycling trips. Both give me the fear when I realize they can cut you faster than you can think.
The description of your X-acto encounter is the stuff of nightmares.
It was actually kind of funny. It was an old handle, and unwilling to grip the brand-new blade I was trying to install, and in frustration I banged it on the drawing board, not noticing that my left hand was in the line of fire.
I sez to myself I sez, “I didn’t just do what I think I dood, dood I?” And pulled the blade out of that middle digit. Squirt, squirt, squirt went the blood, and off to the campus clinic went Your Humble Narrator. Only a butterfly bandage to close it up, but there was nerve damage, and it’s never really been the same since.
Same finger I dislocated in the crash back in 2009, by the way. It must long to be attached to some smarter person.
Can that finger still perform the presidential salute? He can give them out so all of us should return the favor. It’s the right thing to do. Hey donny.
O, indeed. I unlimber it every time I see his name on a bumper sticker or flag.
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!
Hey, thanks, Tom. My two-wheeled devices have always served as an alternative to headshrinkers and prescriptions, especially when I was working for newspapers. These were almost always night gigs, like 4 p.m. until whenever the press ran, usually 1 a.m., so I could get out for a nice long ride in the late morning to flush out my headgear before the next shift in the barrel.
As for Tricky Dicky, I was on a bike throughout that bleak era, since I didn’t get a driver’s license until I turned 18 during my first year at college (1972) and then promptly lost it on points violations and found myself straddling the Schwinn agin. When I graduated from another college in ’77 the folks laid a Datsun “Lil’ Hustler” pick-’em-up on me for finally gitting ’er done, and bikes took a back seat until I started turning into a crazy fat bastard in the Eighties and it was either root hog or die.
I asked my doc to prescribe an antidepressant and it proved even worse than being depressed, so I bought another bike. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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….
Haw. I always worried about a cat jumping on top of the wood stove for the warmth and finding it a little too much so. Miss Mia Sopaipilla was always fond of toasting her po-po on the DSL modem/WAP in Bibleburg.
Upper teens here in North Cackalaky for a week or so. Still have a dozen or so logs left over from the lot clearing. Keeping the fireplace hot and hopefully the electric bill in check…ha. My ’97 Stihl and 2012 Husky keep the rounds coming. Bought a Honda powered splitter this year for the krib. And as of about two weeks ago I still have a goose egg on my right shin from an attempted hatchet split on a rock surface that decided it wanted to mar some human flesh.
Owie. In CrustyTucky I narrowly missed putting an ax through one foot while splitting a poorly placed round in icy conditions. Thank Dog for Vasque Clarion boots.
I gave up my Stihl 395 chainsaw when I left Montana. Over the 42 years in the great northwet, I wore out 2 pioneer chainsaws, one 19-inch bar and one 24 inch bar. plus a crappy Remington, but my STIHL was a solid workhorse.. The fact that I heated 1400 sq fit recycled beer can from October to April was a reason I cut five (5)to six (6) cords of wood prevented an electric and fuel oil bill that equaled a mortgage payment. was mitigating factor. But Albuquerque, though 2500 fit higher, is plumb tropical compared to NW Montana. If a tree goes down now, I call a tree service. too old for that Paul Bunyan shit. split wood and packed it like a mule.. Good strength training though.