Gotta Make Me One of These!

Yesterday we met Matt and Tasha at a cornmaze near Jasper, GA. They were much more reasonable on price than larger cornmazes we've visited, so on a whim I decided to buy us each a turn on the corn cannon...

What fun! You drop a cob of dried corn down the barrel of the cannon (for all the world like a mortarman in an old WWII movie or the old tv show "Combat!") Then you hit the switch, and a blast of compressed air shoots the cob about 150 feet into the air.

I came the closest to hitting the target, I think! But later, the guy running the show changed to a smaller bore, and the thing started shooting about twice as high in the air.

Don't know what I'd do with a corn cannon, but it sure was fun!

Finished up!

Saturday Debbie and I finished up her building. She really helped me with the times it was simply essential to have a 3rd hand! And she got her share of blood blisters and minor cuts, too. But the building is up, looking fine, and already has a lot of stuff stored in it. Now I just have to put on the 'tie-down' kit to keep it from flying away in a wind (not that I seriously think it would--I built the building on a foundation of 6x6 treated beams!

Sunday was another thing 'finished up.' Our church paid off an 11-year indebtedness that started off at a half-million dollars. Even after I came as pastor in January 2007, we still owed nearly $100k. But thanks to generous donations, the debt was paid, we burned the note (and all those pink shreds from the promotional posters) and we all had a great potluck lunch after worship.

Another thing that looks to be finished up is the stock market...I calculated that the losses to my retirement fund roughly equal my entire earnings for the 1 & 1/2 years I've been pastor at this church. So any 'early retirement' plans are probably on indefinite hold. Seems like the last time we had a dip (collapse?) like this, it took 7-10 years for the market to recover. Hope it won't this time...but I'm afraid it may take even longer. Pity the poor builders, carpenters, etc. who will be out of work until the 'existing inventory' of foreclosed homes gets sold.

Building together

This summer, I've been building a combination storage building/shop down in the woods behind the house. Unfortunately, I have only completed the foundation and floor of it. So Debbie got impatient, and insisted that we get a much smaller metal storage building for her to put 'her' outdoor stuff in.

We managed to find a good kit for an 8x10 metal building at Lowe's, and they had a floor system thrown in for free. However, after looking at the floor system, I decided that we needed to build the building raised off the ground, which entailed cutting up some 6x6 treated posts that I had left from my own building, setting them up, and installing some 2x6 treated lumber under the floor system. Then I had to put some chipboard on top of the flooring...so with all that, it took up most of the day yesterday.

When Debbie got home, we started working together on the building. I have an occupational disease of do-it-yourselfers: I assume that my helper can read my mind. Since Debbie's not too experienced with outdoor work, running electric screw guns/drills, etc, it was interesting. I managed to cause her to get a really bad blood blister on her finger, but she was indispensable in getting up the siding on the building. Some of the kit just could not have been done by one person.

We finished all the framing and side parts, but before I could get the roof on, I had to go to a church meeting last night. Today it's raining, and it's forecast to continue through tomorrow, so I don't know when I will be able to finish this thing up.

Debbie's remark was, "It only took us 35 years to get to the place we could work together!"

Further firewood and other outdoor adventures

Yesterday Claude Mathis and I spent most of the morning until just after noon splitting wood from the huge oak tree we cut down for the lady near Mineral Bluff. Wow, when Claude said the splitter was 'massive' he wasn't kidding. Wish I had a camera phone so I could have taken a picture of it.

Imagine a two-wheel cart made of steel beams, with a trailer hitch on one end, wheels that look like they were surplus from a WWII jeep, a two-cylinder motor (no mufflers!) that may have been an early motorcycle motor connected with a big chain to a 3-stage pump that came from the hydraulic system of a big airplane. There were two tanks made of stainless steel (the only part of the contraption not rusty!), one for gas, and one for hydraulic oil. At the back of this thing was a HUGE beam, with a hydraulic cylinder that looked like it may have come from a front-end loader like they used to use in the mines near here. (Did I mention that this thing was built in the repair shop at the Copper Company, when the guys there didn't have anything else to work on?)

At the foot of the huge beam was a steel plate that drove itself solidly into the ground and formed a base for the wood you want to split. The cylinder drives a wedge that looked like an execution instrument...and did it ever split wood! Sometimes the oak was a little too tough, and we'd shut the motor down. Then you'd have to wind an old-fashioned starter cord and give it a smart, hard yank, and hope the thing would start. Claude tried to start it for 10 minutes before I got there, and finally figured out that the hyd. pump wasn't cut off--he was trying to simultaneously start the motor and drive the pump! But after that, it worked fine, most of the time. We split some 'rounds' that were 22" high and 32" across!

I really loaded down 'old yeller,' my pickup. When I started up the hill, the back bumper was so low that I dragged the ground when I went over a ditch. Fortunately momentum carried me on over and up the hill.

Claude didn't have good luck with his trailer...it was loaded so that at every bounce, the wheels of the trailer screamed from rubbing against the fenders. And his big Suburban-type vehicle would just sit on the hill with its tires spinning on the pasture grass, trying to pull the hill.

Then on the 4th try coming up the hill, his trailer hitch actually broke! But he did manage to get his share of the wood home by today, and was getting his trailer out of the pasture and fixed.

I drove no more than 30 mph all the way home, since the heavy load really had me swaying. But I made it, and all the wood's now stacked between some dogwoods beside our house.

Today I spent all day clearing low-hanging limbs, burning our pile of brush, and beginning to cut a roadway to my shop I'm putting up in our back woods. One tree fell the wrong way and I had to winch it out of another tree! I've ended up with another pile of branches about as big as the pile I burned.

Almost forgot...I finally got almost all our assorted power equipment to the shop for repairs and maintenance. I'll have to take Mamaw's snapper on Monday or Tuesday. Matt, if you read this, you're probably going to get either Mamaw's snapper or my old John Deere, whichever is worth keeping. I'll sell the other one and give the money to Mamaw. Hope I get the tiller and/or mechanical mule back in time to do some fall plowing for our garden. I've decided that the problem is that our soil is just poor. It needs fertilizer and amendment...just too much red clay! And I'm going to make the garden spot a lot smaller than before, so we can actually tend it. I may even move everything up near the garden I made for Debbie this year.

The junker Ford mower is on the back of the truck to go to the scrapyard. Debbie's really glad!

Must get a shower. I'm really tired and dirty.

Firewood 2

Today I spent a couple of hours helping load up the lady's share of firewood from the tree we cut (see the previous post) Claude cut it in 1-foot lengths for her little woodstove. She will get about 4 or 5 "yard trailer" loads, some of which we will split for her tomorrow. I brought home a truckload of oak for me. I will have to split some of it, too.

Tomorrow we tackle splitting the big rounds with a big hydraulic log splitter that was originally built over at the old Copper Company. Claude says it is a real monster, and that our only problem will be getting the wood rounds up onto it to split.

After we finished up at the lady's house, Claude came by our place and cut down three big maple trees that were damaged about 6 years ago when the remains of a hurricane came through. So I have lots of wood to cut up for this fall and winter!

Maybe we can get the fireplace insert we've been thinking of buying. It's supposed to pretty much heat up the whole house, if you let the "fan only" part of the heat pump system run. We'll see!

Firewood

It all started with a post on the "free stuff" group that operates in our county. A lady mentioned that she would split a whole oak tree's worth of firewood, if someone would cut the dead tree down for her.

So I went by and saw it...a MASSIVE white oak tree that died last spring. It probably was a victim of lightining. I may take a photo of the view from this lady's yard. She has awesome views of the surrounding mountains in NC/TN.

Later in the day, I learned that Claude Mathis, our associational missionary (that's a Baptist thing) also was looking for firewood. He has 1) a better chainsaw than me, 2) training from Disaster Relief on how to use the chainsaw, and 3) acess to a woodsplitter. So he was elected to take down the tree.

Mostly, I stood around and watched, though I did lend a hand with an ax when we ran into embedded old nails in the trunk. And I sharpened the chainsaw some. I left Claude yesterday afternoon cutting "rounds" out of the trunk. It was over 32" in diameter, and the tree was well over 40 feet tall. Like I said, massive! I'd hate to think how much the thing weighs.

Anyway, that's a chore I have to do Thursday and Friday afternoons and Saturday. To get the wood cut, split, and transported to three places--the lady's porch (she's hooking up a wood heater to supplement her propance heat this winter), to Claude's house, and to our house.

Cutting wood takes me back a lot of decades to when I used to help my younger uncle Troy cut wood for granddad Dyer's house. We had to cut kindling, small stuff for the cookstove, medium stuff for the wood heaters, splits about 2 feet long for the fireplace, and cut the limbs about 6 or 8 feet long to go under the sorghum syrup cooking pan.

Lonesome Dove Parade, Karnes City, Texas

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove was a great book, and a great miniseries on television, too. It's also a parade and festival in Karnes City, Texas. In the picture above, that's my middle son Nathan in full sunglasses bandmaster marching mode...reminds me SO much of his old band director from Oconee County, GA.

And at the festival, granddaughter Brenna was showing off the new UGA cheerleader outfit that her mom bought for her in Athens on their recent trip. It was also great to read on Nathan's blog how many friends were there on their front porch and lawn to watch the parade go by.

Maybe the KC band will somehow get invited to the parade for the UGA bowl game this year (or some year soon!) Meantime I just wanted to share these two images grabbed from Kayla and Nathan's blogs.