"If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way." - Mark Twain

He's single, ladies.

I fired up the splitter at 7 a.m., figuring that was a sufficiently neighborly hour. It's loud and I wear ear plugs while using it, so I'm sure all my neighbors could hear it.

It took me too long to figure out the smart move was to sit on a round while I worked. We started out with Pam on the trigger and me loading and unloading, but I was working solo a couple of hours later.

Here's a video of the thing in action at that point where I was doing it myself and kneeling. the machine is very powerful.

I started at 2:30 yesterday and worked on the first pile until 5:00. These were the logs that could have gone to the mill but wouldn't fit on the last load and "weren't worth coming back for." I now understand why they were so difficult to split; these rounds were from live logs, and therefore very wet. And heavy. And fibrous. So I only got about halfway through those rounds, and picked up this morning where I left off.

I worked until 5:00 with a one hour break for lunch and a conversation with Todd, a good neighbor up the road. More on that later.

I now have two of the three piles split and ready for stacking. Every part of my body hurts and I still have the largest pile left, but we already have enough split wood for the next four or five years. We go through about a cord and a half per winter and have 3 cords already in the woodshed. The to piles I split will, I think, amount to another five or six cords. The remaining pile will produce at least three more cords, probably more.

Do you ever find yourself in a situation so bizarre, so over the top, that the only thing you can do is laugh? That's what Pam and I did this morning when we looked at the huge pile of split wood from that first bunch of rounds. It really is ridiculous, and the next problem is figuring out where to stack it.

Todd, the aforementioned neighbor, has been a big help with a number of things. The original plan was that we'd divide the cost of rental for a week and each use it for three days.
I need a break, so Todd took the splitter home an hour ago and will use it tomorrow. I'll get it back and do that last pile Monday. My dime. It really is the least I can do.

So tomorrow morning we'll go to church (UFC) and in the afternoon I'll do some work outside, maybe prepping the area where I think I'll stack this wood. Maybe by Monday my body can be talked into one last day of this.

BTW, I've enjoyed learning stuff through all of this. Today I learned that at 65 I still have pretty good reflexes, which is why I still have that nifty opposable thumb on my left hand.