Well, I came home to lovely Sherman again, and that means that I don’t have reliable Internet. I’m currently leeching internet from my dad’s office, so I can check up on the intarwebs.

There are so many things that have happened recently to blog about, so whenever I’ve got some reliable internet access, I’ll post some more stuffs but, this is what I got for now:

This past Saturday, I spent the day helping my brother grind stumps. That job is about as exciting as it sounds. Basically, the stump grinder is a gigantic, heavy lawnmower-like machine, only instead of blades spinning underneath it, it has a giant grinding wheel sticking vertically out the front. That blade spins, and grinds up stumps left after cutting down trees. To get to that point, though, the trees have to be cut down.

Several months back, my brother had already cut the trees off to a few feet high. So, what we needed to do was cut those off a couple inches from the ground. Sounds easy enough, eh? I grabbed the chainsaw, and after almost cutting my own leg off getting it started, I got going. The engine was revving loudly, the chain was whirring, and adrenaline was flowing. I was man. I had chainsaw. I cut trees. Rowr.

I put the quickly spinning chain up to the wood, and to my surprise, the chain began spewing sylvan shrapnel in every conceivable direction (and some not so conceivable, I think). In a great show of male bravado, I grinned at the carnage. I’m still picking splinters out of my gums.

A little later, I was cutting through yet another stump and I apparently hit a knot, down in the wood. That bit, being harder than the rest of the tree, grabbed the chain and wrenched it from the bar. Much to my chagrin, my carnage-making machine had just been reduced to a paperweight. I grudgingly lugged the saw up to the table to begin the task of reattaching the chain (a task, by the way, I had never done before, but was certain I could accomplish). After a few minutes of admiring the mechanism, I saw how it worked, reattached the chain, and resumed my work.

I got out the the woods, started up the chainsaw again, and off I went. On that first stump after I reattached the chain, I quickly realized that this was much more difficult than it had been previously, and there was a lot of smoke now too. The smoke wasn’t coming from the saw so much as it was the tree. My brother came over, laughing, and informed me that I had put the chain on backwards.

I went to reattach it, the right way, when he said that he was about to take a lunch break, so I went with him. Upon our return, I reattached the chain, correctly, got back to cutting, and then I stacked all the wood up on the firewood holder.

All day, I had a running monologue in my head about how much I hated being out there, how much I was hot, tired, and just wanted to leave. It was hard work, to be sure, and I didn’t like it one bit. But, at the end of the day, as my brother was hopping in his truck to head home, I look back at the woods, and where there used to be a sea of trees, with 2-3 foot tall tree nubs interspersed. Now, there was a nice clean tree line, with just the full trees in place, not too crowded, not too sparse. We’d done well. I was hot, tired, and dirty, but I was mighty proud of the work we’d accomplished that day.

I immediately went home to shower and nap. ’twas a good day, indeed.