Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Among the Trees

Every time that I step outside I seem to be fighting the trees. When they talk about the amazing colors of fall in New England, no one seems to mention that the clean up is worse than at Woodstock. I've been blowing leaves with abandon and clearing paths to the firewood that I split last spring.


After two eye blistering days at the computer and drawing board, I took to the woods to take down a couple of trees for next year. I know that winter is bearing down on me and I am woefully short on firewood for this year, but I still reverted to my favorite posture in the woods, playing.

I got a new hatchet at a garage sale recently and it holds an amazing edge. It's one of those blades that rings out when you tap it. So I took a few minutes and hewed one side of this ash log.

It isn't exactly a hewing axe, which would be flat on one side, but I sharpened it so that it was close to one and for a lefty too.
I got it reasonably flat. The blade held the edge and took great shavings but it would have been better with the correct geometry. It was all that I could do to keep from building a fort.


7 comments:

  1. Pete - as someone once told me, the trick to dealing with leaves in the fall is just to "leave" them!

    Love you blog
    Scott Estepp

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  2. Do be careful; your nerd is showing.

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  3. Andy,
    fine, just don't come knocking on my awesome fort.

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  4. Scott,
    I'm afraid that if I "leave" them, that my dogs and goats will get lost!

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  5. Our friend from Nashua, NH laughed at us when we asked him about raking leaves. He politely told us the March wind would take care of them. We still rake leaves. We split firewood today, but not with an ax, we had a gas powered splitter. We used to split wood with a wedge and hammer, when we were young.

    Kerry is lefty too and he says God made some special people and the rest are right handed. :-)

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