"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

First, some illustrated news items, with the info below each pic:

I spent the morning hauling the rounds I've been cutting up from the creek to another pile I'm creating. It's 30' short of the first pile, which is more uphill. I decided the splitter I'll rent can be backed down the slope, so why should I haul some very heavy rounds up to that first pile? Just getting them into the wheelbarrow is real work. That upper pile is larger and will probably yield between three and four cords of wood, with the bottom pile giving me two-plus.

But wait! There's more! Here are the eight logs that wouldn't fit on Dick's last load to the mill and got left behind for...more firewood. Each of these logs is 32' long, so I'm guessing they represent another cord or two of wood. I'll try to get them cut into rounds Monday morning.

Down by the creek, yet more cutting to do. I've learned the term school marm, which is tree cutter's speak for a fir tree that splits into two major branches off the main trunk. One of the dead trees was a school marm about 100' tall and 36" in diameter, with the split 30' up. Here's a pic of the bottom section, which measures 27' as it lays.

And here's the spot where the two major trunks emerged from the lower trunk. I've heard and read that school marms are dangerous, but the timber guys I've asked haven't been able to give me a reason why it earned them that nickname. After looking at this one on the ground I think I know why they're dangerous.

I measured the depth of that hole in between the two legs, and it's 62" deep! And the bottom is what a timber guy would call punk. The rain sits down in that hole and each year deepens the rot. At some point this rot would have so weakened the tree that about 100' of it would have come down on....? The coop? MoHo?
If you go up a couple of pics to that first school marm pic you'll not that it's sitting on top of some other logs. I'm not sure I can get the marm cut into rounds because my saw only has a 20' bar, so it and the logs under it may just have to rot in place. I'll give it a go come Monday, too.

I spent the afternoon working on the fence. With the corners and T-posts in on three sides it's time to put up the 4' no-climb fence with 4" squares. It comes in a 330' roll that weighs enough that it was loaded into the trailer I rented with a forklift. So cutting the 45' and 75' runs I put up this afternoon was pretty close to real work. And it took some ingenuity to get it tensioned adequately. Add together a fence stretcher, a come-along, 20' of chain, and a Kia Sorento and you get this.

I debated spending the $$ on the fence stretcher but I'm glad I did. Anything I would have fashioned would have taken too much time and not worked as well.

By the time I quit at 3 p.m. I had two sides done, including the longest. Getting the clips that hold the fence to the T-posts installed was a bit of a trick. Thank you, YouTube. The side opposite the long run goes right next to the burn pile so it will wait until that's gone. I might try to get the other short side done tomorrow after church.

During the 10 years I spent teaching at the college I watched a lot of romances develop. Some were fun to observe, some scary. I also watched too many good "catches" go ignored, usually because college males have far too many hormones to take note of anything more than appearance. "Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised" (Prov. 31:30). Put less elegantly, time is a cruel master and gravity will take its revenge, but that's a lesson lost on the young.

I also saw some gals so intent on finding a mate that they made what clearly seemed like bad choices. That dynamic led me to come up with the following aphorism:
People who want to get married in the worst way usually do.

That adage has any number of parallels, corollaries. We all admire the person who perseveres through sheer force of will and finally masters a skill or achieves that goal. But far more often, someone who wants to ______ in the worst way usually does.

The homiletics professor in me has seen that play out in the pulpit. It's been said that someone considering pastoral ministry should only take that path if they simply could not do anything else. OK, I get it. But more than a few guys convince themselves they're called by God to preach and want to do it in the worst way.
They usually do.