On Its Way

It shipped! It shipped! I never thought I could be so excited about a bit of copper, plastic and gold colored rayon. My spool of wire is somewhere between here and Willington, Connecticut. It should be here this week. Once I get the wire, I get to rewire the lights. Once the lights are rewired, the electrician can hang them up. I'm hoping that by Christmas we'll be done with the contractors and we can live in peace.

I'd never heard of Willington before, so a quick Google led me to their municipal site. Looks like a pretty cool place to live. Check out the beginning laido course. Just under it is a class for basic foil fencing.

We got a ton of things done over the weekend, due almost wholly to the visit of the in-laws. We were able to buy a guest room bedroom set, a rug for Penguin's room and a rug for the living room. And we got several boxes unpacked. Thankfully the snow held off (they were predicting another two to four inches on Saturday), which was great because the snowblower is in the shop for a tune up. FIL and I looked at it on Saturday and concluded that since the quick fix attempts didn't work in repairing it, there were probably better ways to spend our time than taking apart a carburetor in an unheated garage.

What I really wanted to get done, but didn't, was dropping off the white oak to the sawmill. It is surprising how heavy a six foot long, 14 inch diameter piece of white oak is. Those that know me, know that I am definitely not a hulk of human being. The better part of my energy seems to go into something other than muscle growth (not fat either, so I'm not sure what happens to it). And with a sedentary computer job, my raw lifting power is nothing to brag about. Still, both my wife and I could barely lift the largest of the four logs that we saved from the tree trimming we did immediately upon taking possession of the house.

A little bit of research online suggested that a log of that size would weigh between three hundred and four hundred pounds depending on wood density and water moisture content. Rolling it to the trailer was difficult, but not impossible (especially when I used metal pipes underneath it as rollers). Lifting it up to the trailer, however, was impossible. So I took a cue from the ancients and have been slowly using 2 x 4s to create cribbing underneath it. Once I get it to the height of the trailer, I hope to just push it forward off the cribbing onto the trailer. That's a "this week" project. If I don't write again, you'll know it didn't go well and I was crushed under several hundred pounds of oak tree.

I hope that the neighbors are enjoying the show we're giving them. We've had two diggers out, had the electrical pole removed, trimmed up trees and now we have a six foot log resting fifteen inches off of the ground on 2 x 4 cribbing. All of this is, of course, perfectly visible from the street. I wonder what they'll think when I start boiling up maple syrup in the backyard?