It has been far too long since I have written and posted here; and frankly I have no excuse. Part of it is that I am not sure I even still have an audience any longer given my huge gaps in posting. Part of it is age and time related: as I age I find myself to be of a single-tasker than a multi-tasker.
What I mean by this is that if I have… let’s say a doctor appointment at 1PM, I am unlikely to plan or schedule anything else for that day, because I am busy! As ludicrous as that may sound, it is a pattern of thinking that can often creep into an older person’s mindset. Recall the Seinfeld episode where Kramer convinced Jerry to cash all his grandmother’s birthday checks. The sudden demand on her bank account placed her in the red so the bank called her to come to the bank to straighten things out so the next morning she was shown sitting on the edge of bed, fully dressed in her good dress, clutching her purse, waiting to go to the bank at 5:30 in the morning!
Of course, it is an absurd and unrealistic behavior and once you recognize it, you can easily and quickly overcome it. But it lurks there in the background of your mind waiting to trip you up the next time you have two things to do on the same day. Now in fairness to myself, often the “other thing” I want to do is probably something like hiking which takes 4 to 6 hours to do and truly, once done I am unlikely to want to go home, shower, and then go do something else.
The time reference in this discussion is just as it sounds: time and the lack thereof. Now long since retired, I have a routine. My days are often scheduled around things that need to happen every week. For example: grocery shopping every Monday and Friday; it only takes an hour or so but it is a “must-do” activity. And as such, I am unlikely to hike on either of those days because once done shopping and bringing them in, it is already late to start to go hike. Most hikes are a 30-45 minute drive from home so getting back from shopping even at 9:30am means an almost too-late start to go hike. So, I plan other activities such as cutting the grass or other yard work.
Wednesdays we go out for a movie and then an early dinner so that precludes going hiking as well. And of course we have our grandkids over; Monday and Tuesday during the schoolyear (although this September Teddy starts kindergarten so he will be in school five days a week, but we will still have Charlotte half-days for Monday and Tuesday). We also have them over on Saturdays. And even during the summer we have them over Monday and Saturday.
My point is that days fill up quickly. And to add to that, I absolutely need 65-75 minutes every day (that I do not hike) for my heart walk. I try my hardest to get in at least an hour of a high-intensity walk for the health of my heart every day possible. Summer is nice for this in a few ways: I can walk in the morning, the afternoon, or evening thanks to the extended daylight. I hesitate to walk in the evening in winter due to getting dark so early and the risk of being hit by a car. But a summer walk midday can be tough due to extreme temperatures and being in direct sunlight for so much of the walk (as I walk local roads). But I do have to carve out the time for at least an hour of hard walking.
And this summer my days have been filling up even more so; I am painting the house. Happily it is a ranch house so not too difficult but it is a lot of work and takes up a lot of my time. And of course in a 60+ year old house, there are always repairs for damage from age and environment: rot, insect/critter damage, etc. on the shingles and molding and even the fascia behind the gutters. As an example I had a lot of damaged shingles on the southeast side of the house – a gable end – due to invasive vegetation such as ivy along with lack of good sunlight. I contracted to have the damaged shingles replaced but the time and labor to remove and replace selected damaged shingles was greater than the cost of stripping the entire wall and re-shingling it, which is what I ended up doing. So being new wood, that wall required two coats of paint which added to the time required for painting.
The weather has also impacted my painting project: we had a long stretch of weather where the outside air temps were well above 85dF, often over 90dF. You can’t paint when it’s that hot, the paint cures too quickly so I would often only get some early morning time to paint before the temps got too high. Of course I have temperature limits as well; at 70 now, four or five hours is enough effort for me in the summer heat!
But wait – there’s more! Our yard was a tree lover’s paradise when we bought the house. We had cedars that framed the drive way, rhododendrons on the street and in front of the house, and around twenty majestic oaks, all over 75-100 years old. Environments change, climates change, and all living things age and die and little by little we lost more and more vegetation. Then in 2016 the gypsy moths showed up for a two-year feeding frenzy in our little slice of heaven. They devastated our oaks and we ultimately lost at least fifteen of them. Many of the ones we lost were way back in the woods so while a loss, a little easier to take than the ones in the yard proper. We lost four or five over the next couple of years, residual damage from the moths.
Happily we had five massive oaks in the front yard that survived the feeding frenzy, even though they were severely damaged they managed to survive…for a while. About 5 years ago we lost one in the front by the driveway. Then we had one that had a decent lean towards the house; my best guess was that it might graze the side of the house should it fall, but my wife feared it would fully hit the house. And when it comes to safety of the house and occupants, we had to play it safe and remove it. Then we lost another in the front along the front of the yard a couple of years ago.
That left us three in the front: one roadside and two in the center of the yard. Well this spring I noticed the one by the road was dead – it still had some sucker limbs with leaves but all the main leaders and branches were leafless and clearly gone. And to top it off, one of the oaks in the center of the yard had developed a massive overhang above the roof. I had battled its propensity to lean over the roof through the years, periodically have branches removed to mitigate the risk. But over the last year or two it really grew out and over the roof…and was exhibiting a massive root bulge on the side opposite the lean, a clear indicator that the lean was affecting the structural integrity under the earth.
I hate taking down a live tree but in this case I felt there was no other option so I got quotes to take them both down and now they are gone. I will insert a comment here that after they were both down, the dead oak showed no signs of disease to help indicate why it died. But the living oak, once down, proved my decision a correct one: I was able to insert a machete all the way up to the hilt into the stump, with ease. It was all punky wood! The trunk was around 32” diameter at the base and I would say 18”-20” from the center out was punky. The tree may well not have survived the next hurricane or blizzard.
As I always do, I told them I wanted the wood up to 6” diameter; they then chip/grind all the smaller branches leaving me just properly sized wood-stove material. In this case, they came in with a crane and a bucket truck and made short work of it, getting both 50’-60’ trees down on the ground in less than two hours and with the area cleaned and branches chipped/ground. But – they were left in a huge stack of 20’-25’ long segments. Ordinarily no big deal, but this was the front yard and every day sitting on the lawn meant more damage and death to the grass underneath it all.
This meant I had to get the mess cleaned up fast. But a 32” diameter piece of oak one-foot long weighs in the range of 400lbs. So a twenty-foot-long piece such as I had weighs in around 8,000lbs. And I had several of them. Not to mention the smaller limbs ranging from 6”-8” up to 12”-14” diameters. And to top it off, the trees were fallen on Thursday and we left for a three-day trip to Maine the next morning.
So as time (and weather) has permitted, I have been cutting the massive pieces into 14”-16” pieces. But even a 14” piece of 30” diameter (or greater) is well over 400lbs. and is impossible for me to get off the ground and into the wheelbarrow to move down to the back to my woodpile location. That meant each piece I trimmed into the right length still needed to be split in to pieces I could pick up and get into the wheelbarrow. The larger segments split into quarters would yield pieces till well over 100lbs. each so I usually end up splitting them into eighths for manageability (and for my back).
Splitting oak is always a crap-shoot – you never know what you’re going to get – and live oak is notoriously tough to split. In this case the “live” oak was dropped last so the pieces of that tree were the first I had to go through and I was quite worried about splitting it but to my surprise, it split beautifully for the most part. Crotches (a section is the tree where a branch or leader grew from the trunk creating a for or crotch) are always a bear to split and that was true with this one, but for the most part, it split great.
I assumed I would have as easy a time splitting the dead one, likely even easier. I was wrong – I was so wrong! Splitting that dead tree was like splitting steel-belted radials tires!! Wiry, gnarly, twisted, and a total test of my 70-year-old muscles and patience!! Not a single piece of that tree larger than 16” in diameter split with just my 8lb. maul, unlike the “live” one that I did 99% with my maul. I needed my full array of splitting assistants such as wedges and axe heads to get through just about every piece.
My other most valuable tool throughout the whole project has been my eight-foot long 1” diameter black iron pipe. As Archimedes famously said: “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” Or in my case, a lever long enough to move massive pieces of oak tree segments! That pipe has been invaluable over the six or seven years in helping me move sections of trees around to make room for safe cutting and to roll over for those sections too wide for my 18” chainsaw bar to cut all the way through in one shot.
The trees were taken down a little more than three weeks ago; out of those three weeks I have had maybe five or six days of labor to get everything cut, split, and moved to the back – around six hours for several of those days and 2-4 hours for the other days. So all in all, not a bad effort on my behalf! I still have four or five pieces left out front – all pieces that have so far resisted all my efforts to split them into manageable enough to pick up and move – but they are now in the ground cover near the fence rather than on the grass so while I continue to work on them, I am no longer motivated by fear of killing my lawn.
As a result, I now have a massive pile of wood, 99% of which is already partially split. This will keep me busy through the rest of the summer and through the fall, and possibly into the winter as well. I have never had such a huge pile waiting for splitting and stacking but I am not complaining!!
But all this helps explain, at least a little bit, why I’ve been so silent for so long. Another part of my silence is due to my lack of direction, or focus, of my blog. When I began I envisioned writing about thoughts and concepts that intrigued me and would hopefully do the same with others. And truthfully that is how it was…for a while. But over time it devolved from a forum of lofty thoughts to Bob’s diary; a mundane and uninteresting monologue of the things that happened in my daily life that no one else could ever have in interest in. And so I have taken my leave from writing. I’ve posted a number of guest articles to at least provide content that many people can enjoy. But every time I sat down to write something myself, I’ve ended up boring myself on behalf of you dear reader! I do not have a solution to this yet, but I am actively pondering the issue and by discussing it, will provoke some thought for improvements.