Category Archives: Home List

The Quasimodo Pile Goes Down—Son of a Birch!

I’ve been taking advantage of our cold weather to split the most ugly, cantankerous, gnarly, and twisted pieces of wood that you can imagine.

Boy, have there been some tough ones. I wrote about the glory of winning in battle over these mean, twisted, miserable chunks of firewood last winter. It’s still one of the truly wonderful parts of our -30 to -40 F cold snaps. The added brittleness of the wood usually makes these stubborn pieces of firewood split fairly easily.

But this year I have one tree that is just killing me. Every damned piece of this thing has been a fight.
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The Boombah Haulage Company

The Boombah Haulage Company, president, CEO, and sole employee.

All those artisanal, hand-crafted heat candies created in the woods behind our house (the Boombah) have to travel to the wood shed somehow to realize their purpose. Yes, they’re pieces of dead trees, but they’ve been diced up into 16-inch lengths for a reason. I generally cut the trees as soon as possible after they die, so they are usually still green and the pieces of future firewood are heavy. So I stack them in the woods for a year or so to begin the drying process. Like a squirrel with little food caches scattered about, I can usually remember where the piles are. I haul them out on a network of foot trails one load at a time on my shoulders. It’s a great workout. I peck away at it when I feel like it.
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Faster Than a Dead Tree

It was a lovely, picture-perfect day to go out into the woods up the hill and create some future firewood that hadn’t fallen yet.
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Heat Candies

This past winter I accomplished a life goal that I didn’t even know could be a life goal. I can start fires in the woodstove without small pieces of wood for kindling. This pinnacle of personal achievement, which I enjoyed performing every day, dropped accidentally into my lap through a combination of hard work and laziness.
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Revisiting the Home Electrocution Handbook

(Shed a Little Light)

A couple of years ago I was splitting wood when somehow I twanged something hard in my left arm. I’m still not sure what I did, but it was painful and it got worse before it got better. It was spring, though, so there was plenty of time to heal it up before I needed it for splitting wood again.
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