There aren't many things I do that require an ax.
Litigation would be more interesting if axes were involved.
Splitting wood is really satisfying. My uncle used to have wood heat and enough land to get a couple of unsplit cords of wood every fall, that I would occasionally (get to) help him split. He had a splitting maul, which was awesome but not the easiest thing for a twelve-year-old to manage.
Litigation would be more interesting if axes were involved.
"Arm yourself when the Lizard Breath smiles."
Litigation would be more interesting if axes were involved.
Litigation would be more interesting if axes were involved.
I wanted to see Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, too.
Too bad I can't find the NYC jury duty video on YouTube.
when i turned 13, we moved into a house with two wood-burning fireplaces. my dad, being an industrious college English professor, ordered some wood: un-split, un-cut logs, 20ft long, fresh. he bought a splitting maul, a wedge, an electric chainsaw, and we set to it.
three months later, we had cut and split all the wood.
being clever, he decided we'd store the newly split logs in the basement, where we could get at them easily when we wanted to burn some, instead of having to go outside in the cold.
the thing about freshly-split wood is: it's full of water (and bugs!). after a week, the walls of the basement were covered in thick black mold.
so then we spent a weekend carrying all the wood back outside, while my stepmother scrubbed the mold off the cellar walls.
so then we spent a weekend carrying all the wood back outside, while my stepmother scrubbed the mold off the cellar walls.
James Howard Kunstler could get a book or two out of the character-building benefits to you and your stepmother, contrasted with the contemptible decadence of central heating and chainsaws.
Splitting wood is really satisfying.
Oh man, it certainly is. Especially when you hit it just right and the two halves fly off the splitting stump in opposite directions. Growing up, we'd get a cord of logs every year that my father would cut with the chainsaw, then it was my job to split and stack it. That was possibly the only chore I actively enjoyed.
10: Fresh-split wood doesn't burn very well either.
The stacking! Yes! The stacking is every bit as satisfying.
10: I wasn't allowed to use the wedge because my father had seen too many shattered faces from flying wedges in the ER. All maul action.
I never really figurd out the trick with the wedge. I understood the maul, and I understood splitting smaller pieces with an axe, but yeah, I was pretty good at making the wedge go one way and the intact log go the other way.
the intact log go the other way
Antisemite.
Moby you don't want a splitting wedge for a bris. You want a chainsaw and then maybe a chisel for detail work.
You want a chainsaw and then maybe a chisel for detail work.
You want I should take a little off the sides?
Splitting wood is really satisfying.
Sawing it also.
"Then there's the bit in the middle, where it's going ZZZ zzz ZZZ zzz ZZZ zzz and you feel like your dad. 'I'm just going out to the garage to saw a plank of wood in half.'"
O/T Slate Headline -- The Only Recipe for Ice Cubes You'll Ever Need
(I'm scared to click through and find out that I've been doing it wrong)
Several years ago I went to a lumber shop in Maine with my dad to get some boards for shutters. We got, I think, four 1x6 planks and asked the guy if he could cut them down for us. "Oh sure," he says, stacks them up, whips out a hand saw, and saws the whole stack in twain in about a minute. Maine: where men are men.
Stacking wood always made me think of the black widows that would end up living in the wood pile, and that freaked me out. Or, I think what really happened, we would get wood delivered and it would get dumped into an unorganized pile and sit there for a few weeks, and then my parents would finally yell at me and my brother enough that we'd go stack it, and by then there was already a high probability of black widows.
Splitting wood is definitely satisfying, once you make sure there are no black widows on it.
22: the key is to add just a pinch of crystal meth.
Splitting wood is definitely satisfying, once you make sure there are no black widows on it.
Racist.
I thought the Slate crowd favored Adderall.
we would get wood delivered and it would get dumped into an unorganized pile and sit there for a few weeks, and then my parents would finally yell at me and my brother enough that we'd go stack it
That was our household also. We didn't have to split it because we were using a fireplace. There was a small door at the bottom and you'd push the ashes down into a small closet in the basement. Before I could leave for college, my brother and I had to empty the bin and carry 18 years of ashes to the curb.
I enjoyed using an axe to chop wood as a kid. Although we usually used a wedge.
I gave away my chainsaw about 8 years ago after reading about too many accidents with chainsaws. It just isnt a tool I want to use once or twice a year.
I grew up so privileged. We didn't even have a fireplace. Plus it was 80° all winter.
I imagine 29.last like the Mean Joe Greene coke commercial. "Here, kid, I won't be needing this anymore." "Gee, thanks, Mister!" [ toss ] "Aaaaugh, my arm!"
we would get wood delivered and it would get dumped into an unorganized pile and sit there for a few weeks, and then my parents would finally yell at me and my brother enough that we'd go stack it
This. I told my parents that the wood had to season by drying out, and more surface area would be exposed for seasoning if we just left it in the unorganized pile. I still had to stack it neatly.
O/T Slate Headline -- The Only Recipe for Ice Cubes You'll Ever Need
Do they want to be punched in the face?
A wood stove was the primary method of heating the house I grew up in, and my father cut the wood himself (he was a lawyer too, FWIW). I helped out throwing the wood around and bringing it in, but was never expected to do the actual cutting. Tried now and then, but never got good at it, and my dad liked doing it himself, or at least didn't mind.
As for getting sleep, light levels matter a lot to me, I think. Normally I get a little less than eight hours of sleep, but when I'm at my parent's house in Vermont, I can easily sleep for nine hours or more. I think it's because not only are they out in the woods, but my old bedroom happens to have heavier curtains on the windows than any place I've lived since. I don't feel tired during a normal day (assuming I wasn't up too late the night before, work isn't too busy, etc.), but then I get up to my parent's house and don't wake up at the usual time at all.
22/36: It's not what one would assume of Slate. It links to this.
I don't want to look at the Slate recipe either, but I discovered with our rental refrigerator that the ice cube trays need to be covered with plastic wrap or they will be distasteful. Yes. #thuglife, etc.
Why don't you throw caution to the wind and buy a new ice cube tray?
Next post: Lizardbreath reveals that she has just opened a second bottle of Num-Numo.
38: Slate headlined it; Slate owns it. Cf. the unjustifiable Farhad Manjoo.
To the OP: I have a theory that there are a lot of people wondering around sleep deprived on a day-to-day basis, and that accounts for a fair amount of grumpiness that people have being out in the world.
Splitting wood is really satisfying.
This is true, but it also makes the me think of the final scene from Return of the Secaucus Seven
Making ice cubes: complicated. You can take extra steps to make them crystal-clear or with spikes. This page indicates that way more of the Internet than one suspects is devoted to ice spikes.
43.3: That was my association too! That is how a Real Man handles a broken heart!
45: Somebody is boiling water to make ice cubes? Somebody is either very confused or has way too much time on their hands!
47: Twice, no less. But somebody lets it cool before putting the trays in the freezer.
48: Well, I suppose nothing is too good for Jesus.
Woodsplitting pictures on my Flickr account -- I can't figure out how to put them in the group from my phone, but they're public. And now off to kayak.
51: Oh, I don't know. It's kind of inspiring. I'm already trying to come up with some kind of heads-on-spikes treat for the girls for Halloween.
When I have extra time, I boil water and then put it into the freezer. Then whenever I need boiling water for a recipe, I can just defrost it.
And this is all without a UBI. Just imagine all the creativity we could unleash.
13. nope.
yet another lesson we learned that winter.
Hopefully the "yellow snow" lesson was learned less directly.
You people are nuts. Chopping wood is scary. You've got a big clumsy edged instrument and sharp stuff flying everywhere.
Woodsplitting pictures on my Flickr account
From this description, I expected action shots. Those aren't "woodsplitting pictures", they're pictures of wood, before and after splitting.
About halfway between La Paz and the jungle, two days' walk from anywhere, there's a 70-80 year old Japanese hermit living in a beautifully maintained garden. Every morning he gets up at dawn to split the day's wood, only he's a tiny little guy, and the logs are as long as he is, so he does a little vertical jump with each stroke. He is my choppy hero. He also strings dead vampire bats out along barbed wire, pour encourager les autres.
I posted my best summer woodpile to G+. It's a thing!
Cutting had been done by a visitor who didn't leave stumps as a crib, or get the logs vaguely the same length. I took out two cinderblocks and the thing goes from one log wide & 2 feet high at the ends, to two logs wide (interlocked by long/short pairs) and five feet high in the middle. Andy Goldsworthy and a slice of pie.
58: Ugh, but there's a snake. That's kind of actiony.
I grew up so privileged. We didn't even have a fireplace. Plus it was 80° all winter.
Heebie makes the veldt sound very pleasant.
And now that I've had some practice, I hardly ever miss the wood completely.
"Remember, it's *hit* the wood, *miss* the leg."
What about the foot? Does that count as part of the leg?
I knew a guy who shot his foot with a pistol. I never asked him about exactly how he did it because he's bigger than me.
So yeah, splitting is great. Every few years I split enough for our occasional use in the fireplace and it takes about an hour or so. And I want more. But probably not too much more; people who do a whole lot of it generally rent or buy these bad boys.
In my (all?*) Boy Scout troop there was a thing called Totin'Chip where you were "authorized" to use a hatchet. When I got my hatchet and passed that I spent a few days just going around the woods chopping things. Somehow I felt empowered by the official authorization and it was temporarily very satisfying.
*Yes, there is even a badge now.
We had to take a test to get ours.
There was also a Fire Chip. We learned about how to safely control a fire and what sorts of accelerants the Fire Marshall would have trouble finding if we didn't want a controlled fire on that particular day.
71: Yes, and I flunked my first test when I did as the older scout asked and ran over and got my ax ... and ran back. Even at that age, I wondered whether there might be hidden cameras somewhere (it was the time when Candid Camera was a thing).
Did I pull similar stunts when I subsequently became an examiner for similar things in the scouts? A little bit.
I even have a fireplace at my own home in Sacramento, and that inevitably means I have black widows, so I pull out the logs and have to crush the widows and it bothers me for a long time.
Weird. I've had a working fireplace or wood stove for most of my life, but the only black widow I have ever seen was removing the cover from my gas grill.
Wow, apo, I had no idea they were so strong! Scary!
While removing the cover, that is. The spider wasn't removing it. (On preview: pwned)
If you want to come to my garage, I've got wood, black widow spiders and possibly rats.
spiders are nothing compared to those jumping crickets.
78: Halford knows how to entice the ladies.
We had mostly wood heat in the house I lived in as a teenager. It's kind of remarkable that I was never made to chop wood, but perhaps I was obviously not the type.
I am very happy to now be living a life where not everything smells of woodsmoke.
Because black widows are beautiful! (N.B. I never have, nor expect to, encounter any outside of photos and Debra Winger movies.)
I hate spiders. I hate them all.
We have a lot of spiders in the basement. We have a pact. If they stay out of sight, I don't squish them. Oh, some spiders are beneficial, they say. I ain't getting close enough to ascertain.
They are, indeed, very beautiful spiders, all sleek and shiny and hairless. Like little arachnid sports cars.
This past weekend we came across a spider in a kayak. It was not scary! I flushed it out with water and Blume then took it away on a stick. Then later Blume said "that was a brown recluse!" Then it was scary! Then today I looked up brown recluses, and they don't live in this part of the world. Now it is not scary again.
This is the time of year that the carpet of crickets is so thick that they get inside the buildings in large numbers and it feels somewhat plague-like.
This is probably the most appealing spider I've encountered.
My house has a fuckton o spiders living near it, for reasons I don't understand. Like, the garbage cans get picked up every week and the spider webs destroyed and then by next week they're covered with webs again. Ditto the area around the porch light. I don't have arachnophobia so I'm mostly OK with it, and the webs aren't too unsightly and are out of the way, but I wonder just why there are so many of them.
On the plus side, the parrots who were driven from my tree in the great parrot v crow backyard war of 2009 have returned and are thriving. Viva Parrots!
94: Have you gotten any shipments of dead people from South America recently?
94: they're feeding on the giant, city-wide ant colony that the eastside of LA was built upon.
I think there's a gigantic "supercolony" of ants that stretches over the whole California coast. Let's google this. Anyhow I dumped some chemicals on those guys and they got out of the house, but maybe that is what the spiders are eating.
giant, city-wide ant colony
Are you sure you don't mean "city-wide giant ant colony"?
Ants are usually pretty well chemically defended against spiders, and also they don't fly into webs. Halford probably has a lot of flies by the garbage -- or would if he didn't have all those spiders! They'll rebuild their webs in a night whenever they're damaged by prey, intruders, or humans moving the garbage. What's amazing to me is how they manage to find spots where other insects are likely to be. One time an orb weaver put up a big web right in the flight path of one of my beehives.
A huge black one did crawl into the car once. It was hanging its web thread right in front of my face while I was driving. That was pretty unnerving.
Mostly though I prefer spiders to flies, so I'm inclined to let them dine to their little hearts' content.
Obligatory link that most of you have probably seen.
94: Is the porch light left on all night? That brings flying insects which bring spiders.
102: Poor spidey.
This dude I vaguely know has some amazing pictures of jumping spiders.
The giant ant colony is made up of Argentine ants. They like to kill each other so the spiders will have plenty of food without even doing any work.
I like that ursyne is unfogged's liason with the kingdom of the spiders.
I thought the whole deal with the giant ant colony was that the Argentine ants aren't fighting each other, which has allowed them TOTAL DOMINATION.
108. Arachnophiliac. The lover that dares not speak its name.
Here spiders are all small and harmless and seem rare. Too bad they only go for flying insects. Those aren't too bad here, but it's the crawling ones that annoy me.
Growing up, my sister was arachnophobic and I had fun giving her a hard time about it - maybe sometimes giving her spiders I found in the house, but more often just disposing of them gently as requested when she found them but complaining about her needing the help. But indoor spiders and outdoor spiders were very different. Indoors they were either tiny or daddy longlegs. In the pasture or barn there were damn big spiders, some bigger than an inch, with yellow and black markings like a hornet. Maybe these, but I'm not sure. Now that I've looked them up, it says they're harmless, but it was still freaky to walk through tall grass or under a lintel and oh shit there's a spider right in front of my face.
The link in 102 makes me sad.
104: Super cool! (Josh & Cala, do not click on that link.)
I quite like (non-poisonous) spiders except for the hairy ones. In Virginia, we sometimes had hairy brown wolf spiders, which were creepy.
111: Josh & Cala, do not click on that link.
It does occur to me that we're doing a decent job of gathering what will be needed in Room 101 when the time comes. (And it will come.)
Josh & Cala: spiders
Asilon & teo: birds
lots of people: rats (how boring and derivative, though)
Flip: middlebrow writing and Penn State football films
Neb: bad grammar and music not of his own choosing
AWB: People generalizing about society in different historical eras.
Halford: Wheat... lots of wheat... fields of wheat... a tremendous amount of wheat...
JP, that sounds like the Appropriate Deaths subthread from a couple of months ago....
Megan: unexplained slices of dried-out deli meat on the bedroom floor.
No, Megan was surprisingly cool with that.
"Oh, some stranger has been traipsing through my bedroom in the middle of the night with deli meats. Well, these things happen. Probably it was a friend of mine."
So it wasn't a stranger!
Your story is coming undone!
116. Right, however I found it frightening so:
Barry Freed: unexplained slices of dried-out deli meat on Megan's bedroom floor.
Picture of surly children on Flickr.
Are there surly children in LB's Room 101 or just pictures of them?
If I were afraid of surly children, I'd never stop shaking.
114: JP, that sounds like the Appropriate Deaths subthread
Yeah, but Room 101 is about encouraging commenters to become more productive members of society, not killing them except for stubborn cases.
Wood is not all that common as a regular fuel here. We have coal or peat products - commercial pressure formed briquettes, and machine-cut turf. We had to stack and re-stack the turf on site to let it dry out before bringing it all home. My brother now owns a bit of land which was partly overgrown with low trees, since converted into firewood after a hell of a lot of chainsawing. So now I have firewood to burn. I could do with splitting it into smaller chunks but don't really want to do so on the balcony ( I have a little hatchet which is handy for splitting briquettes; my family prefers to just use them to help the coal light so thinner is better).
Nobody burns peat here that I've heard of. It's sold for gardening purposes only.
DAMN STRAIGHT NOBODY BURNS ME.
126: So now I have firewood to burn
The idiomatic and literal senses of "to burn" are fighting in my brain when I read that. Hmm, maybe the rule should be that you only use "x to burn" when x is something you would not normally burn.
There is a big political controversy here over banning turf cutting on protected bogs. I'm not even kidding. It's like our version of gun control.
Makes sense. All the densifying-rural areas in the States seem to be having fights over bog control too.
(In our case it's over septic systems that were fine for a small summer cottage and can't support a big year-round house.)
The volume of shit a given person produces is positively correlated with the size of their living space. That's why rich people always look so upset.
