Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

  A few months ago a dead tree down by the former milk barn fell over into the path.  Three days ago Gary cut and split the final pieces of it, which you see here.  When I think about it I find it incredible the amount of memories I have that revolve around fire wood.  Where would I even start recording them? To begin with I'll say that up until the age of 22, which is the first time I left home for an extended period of time, I had never actually lived in a house that didn't have wood heat.  (This was in the summer of '91 when I lived as an exchange student in Mexico for 5 weeks one summer.)  Summers in Mexico don't generally require any sort of heating in the house at all, so I have no idea how they heated their house.  But in very rural coastal Northern California we almost always had to have some sort of heat in the house, year round.  Summer evenings can get quite cool, even in August.  It gets foggy, more often than not, in the afternoo...

Day before yesterday Gary and I processed that dead tree he cut down.  He sawed it into chunks, got the splitter out and we went after it.  This is probably less than half of what he split eventually. As a general rule we will let the pile sit there and just haul it to the carport a load or two at a time as needed.  But this time, as you can tell from the above picture, our pile was just too close to the road.  We know of more than one place locally that has been totally wiped out of goods and whatnot, and we would not be surprised if someone were to come along, stop alongside the road and load up with some wood.  Not that we'd be above helping someone out in need; Gary cuts and hauls his sister's wood.  We went up to his Aunt's place the other day and split some of her bigger chunks of wood so she can handle them easier.  But, like as not, people who'd steal it would resell it.  This time of year firewood is going at a premium.   There ...

 We heat our house with an outside wood furnace.  The indoor furnace can be run on electricity and at times we do use that option, usually in early spring or late fall when the weather is too warm for us to want to have a sustained fire burning, but cool enough to need a bit of heat in the early morning. In winter, however, we keep the wood furnace burning and it does well at helping keep our electric bill under control and keeping the house toasty.  However, feeding the furnace is always a chore.  In fact we need to get a couple more loads of wood today. Here last week Gary was processing more firewood for the furnace.  This is actually just to the East of the front of the house here.  There to the right of the picture you can see a mess of weeds and wood.  That is the remains of a dead tree that fell last year.  Gary has been processing it for the furnace.  And then there in the center of the picture you can see him squatting down sawing ye...