Yesterday was one of those days, I got up at 4:30 got dressed for the day then went down stairs and got the fires started, so far so good. While the stoves were warming up I walked over start the laptop and light the oil lights then head back to the stove where all the heat is. I’m still doing good no flue fires and I only tripped over the dog a couple of times without waking up the entire household. I should note I quite drinking coffee a couple of months ago. I’m not near as excitable as I was for the first two weeks after I quit. Any way the house is starting to get warm so I go to work on a book I’ve been working on for the last few months, a how to manual on chainsaws. Thirty minutes later I’m still looking at what I wrote the day before. Another thing about coffee it has caffeine; caffeine helps your brain focus. Don’t believe me drink coffee for forty plus years then quit cold turkey I can say unequivocally you will have a sever case of ADD. Any one who says caffeine isn’t brain food obviously has an under nourished brain. Any way I’m off on a rabbit trail again; I do that a lot now. Since I’m having trouble focusing I figure maybe a game of mahjong on the computer will kick start my brain. An hour and three games later the house is getting cold, I forgot the refill the stove.
If it weren’t fifty miles to the nearest road I would head to the local Mom & Pop for an espresso-IV to give my brain some motivation. After I get the fire going again I figure work is a lost cause so I close down the laptop and grab an old Louis L’amour novel while I sit by the stove to enjoy the last bit of quiet before it’s time to start rousting the everyone out for the day. When it is time to get everyone else up I put on a CD then start cooking breakfast while the crowd is getting dressed. All goes well I get breakfast going I didn’t burn anything, at least not to bad. Now it’s time to go to work for the day. Today I planned to get some firewood in for one of our neighbors who has a vacation cabin over at the lake. I always love getting their wood in every single tree on their place is on a hillside. So I load up the snow machine with snowshoes, chainsaw and gas and head out their cabin is only about half a mile of alder away. This year has been a low snow year so far we have only had about eight or nine feet. I know that sounds like a lot to you folks down in Georgia but it takes a good fifteen feet to cover the alder patches up here. Fifteen feet will usually translate to about seven feet on the ground after it settles.
After weaving my way though the alders I get to the neighbors back yard their cabin is in a little bowl on the lake surrounded by hills. On one side the hills are about a sixty degree incline the other side are less radical they are closer to thirty degrees. So they are the ones I use to get to the top. Thirty degree slopes usually aren’t to bad even with a foot or two of powder on the crust. I pick out one that looks like a clear shot to the top and blast off. About half way up one of the ski’s finds an alder that wasn’t buried nearly as deep as it should have been. I left my sled with my snowshoes setting back at the cabin a couple of hundred yards away. So now I’m wading through four feet of snow going back to the cabin to find a shovel (I left my shovel at home) and my get the snowshoes. The only shovel I could find was a tiny #2 round point so I grab it and my snowshoes and head back to my buried snow machine. After an hour or so I finally get the snow cleared enough to cut all the alders wrapped around the snow machines ski’s but I’m still no better off than I was an hour earlier. So it’s back home to get a come-a-long and a good shovel. I load everything on a plastic sled and go back to my snow machine. Another hour of digging a hole the size of Rhode Island I’m able to start maneuvering my seven hundred pounds of machine around, thank heaven for reverse. When I finally get it turned around headed down hill it’s four o’clock I’m soaked with sweat, yes your sweat glands work in the cold. I figure it’s time to pick up and call it a day. Today’s is another day and it’s time to get the rest of the clan up and going.