Heel low:
Awesome weekend...went from a day time high of -25C (-13F) to +15C (59F)...having a heat wave (hardly, try 40C/104F in the summer here!) but we'll take what we can. Hate the heat, can't work in it.
Lots of melt, slower than if it happened in the rainy month of June, but such is life as the seasons roar in to change. Laughed as the weather person announced chance of a thunderstorm...WHAT? Yeh, why have a mild transition, get us all ready for summer in one fell swoop...bring on the thunder and lightening--didn't outright kill you with snow and ice...how about an electrical zap to get the heart stopped.
Always, always SO extreme here. So suck it up buttercup, eh?
Had a great Sunday brunch of hotcakes and sausage...
Then a nice greeny veggy fruity prelude to dinner. Course the Mandarins could be heard whistling their approvals..."Don't forget to give us the rinds with some melon attached too!" I can hear their bills clacking in anticipation to make pelts outta the melon.
Love weekends--more time for fun things around the place.
Ground is bare in places where Rick keeps the drive plowed off--can see the gravel peeping thru...ice in the bird yard, but so what is a little skating about to amuse the birds with? I am sure they place bets on how hard I fall...buggers!
Gonna take a bit of time for the swan yard to melt out...here it is now, that's snowshoe hare Krusty's prints in the yard...been zipping about all over the place....blends in well with the white backdrop. Better start thinking about a furry colour change soon...
Here it is in the summer...nicely mowed up.
Drastic dif, eh?
My father was a faller, bragged like the dickens he had NEVER EVER had a drop of oil put in the oil tank to run the furnace in the house he built...a wood/oil combination. This was on the WEsT Coast...humidity was so high you froze yer buns off my Dears...frozen solid...a wet humid cold...at -5C (23F), felt like -40C/F here in drier Alberta...but none the less...I learned early, to love heat from a fire, real heat from a wood stove. Nothing finer to warm yer innards after a long day doing chores outside...come in and warm you up.
So I love wood, fire wood...the bounty of security it means...means you are not going to freeze yer kahoonas off...we all got kahoonas and like to keep them where is--as is, thanks!
So my hero designed up a wall of wood holder.
Love these, so easy to use; so easy to fill, so easy to UNfill. That's Vanna White, aka Fixins there.
Piece of cord in the top with holes drilled and this wall of wood is ready to be taken out, placed and filled on up.
Twenty one walls of wood, filled them all up last year...big push but got 'er done. I love being surrounded by the bounty of firewood...me walls of wood...nothing finer.
So the wood stove has been blasting continuous since September...of my 21 walls of wood, working on my 8th depletion. Got me chomping at the bit to get the split birch on the walls, fill up my slots again.
I LOVE firewood...better than money in the bank & like gold in a vault...I LOVE my walls. Gives me that twinge every time I see them, standing there, air drying, firewood ready & waiting to be loaded up and hauled into the man porch and the house for burning. Royal riches of simple existence...
So last year (not this winter but the one prior, 20 winter of 2012/2013) Rick was working in an area where they had cut down a bunch of birch trees for a pipeline right of way.
Sad really...some of these trees were HUGE (in some cases, two rounds filled a pickup truck box!)...monsters for birch, but such is what happens. So better than leaving this birch to lay and rot, Rick would cut a load after work and haul it home. I would unload and stack it, ready to be split when there was time for that.
These were the piles of rounds as of September 2013. A lot of rounds thar...now they needed to be split...
So Sept to October, was the Split Fest on the birch. Always ready to help, Fixins made sure her toy was close at hand...cause when you stop splitting, well you jest gotta....jest gotta...
Gotta throw the toy...if you can throw the toy, you are not too wounded yet...not too... Fixins l00ks SO serious about this toy...you must throw toy! I have to make sure you have not overdone it...can't have you too tired to share yer dinner with me....if you can't toss toy, Dog says it is "QUITTING TIME!"
So bucket by tractor bucket of splits, the rounds of birch got done...done like it could cook yer dinner if you wanna...
Up the hill went the tractor with its buckets full of splits, where I tidy it up into really BIG piles--running outta room piles of splits...could not load up any more walls of wood because, well all 21 were jammed full. So had to have WINTER, a good Canuck winter to burn off some of them walls of wood.
What makes me so excited about the nice melty weather...these piles of splits...well now that we got empty walls of wood, EIGHT...to fill now--can get on that! A great White North cold winter has done her job...now I can fill my walls...how delish!
So this is the same shot as the pic above, only its been thru a winter here. But the sun is shining, the snow and ice is a melting....
What better time to be had than to be stacking the birch, the gold bricks of potential heat!
So today, you see how Fixins is laughing...laughing..."So you wanna pile up wood, get stacking those walls up do you?"
Gotta bring a mallet, give a few of the splits a good smack to loosen them, but planning on doing a wall or so a day after me chores...should be a blast. No bugs, not hot, just right, wonderbar!
Empty walls of wood jest a waitin'...waiting on me to fill them up, pile it high and pile it good...so the Chinook winds may blow, blow and dry the birch splits out...for burning...magnificent heat.
Oh my, Fixins is already yawning...plum tired out the OLD dog...so time for old inspector dawg to head in for a nap, where else does one nap but beside the wood stove...poor dog...so has to rowf it, eh?
Doggone & Chicken UP!
Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada
I just love ole Fixin's. Tell her if no one will throw her toy to come stay at Auntie Laura's in Alabama and we'll throw her toy.
