It's been a very short weekend, what with Saturday work and friends coming over to stay. When they left Sunday afternoon "to go to the gym to work off all those calories from your fried breakfast", I told OH that I was going to make a start on splitting the wood that's in our driveway.
Sure enough, as soon as I'd accumulated a nice pile of tree trunks on the patio at the back, having carried them one by one from the front of the house, OH appears, helpful as ever, though uninvited, telling me how to use my tools. Perhaps he couldn't bear to watch.
He grabs the wood grenade and the mallet AND my splitting maul, leaving me the bowsaw, and starts splitting wood in our driveway, in full view of the entire street. The sounds of the metal mallet hitting the metal wood grenade sends ringing vibrations up and down the street, and sure enough, after less than 2 minutes, neighbour P is standing next to OH, in his slippers, and explains he's been sent outside by HIS other half to investigate what my OH was up to now. Apparently the vibrations from our driveway carried right into their living room. P points out to OH that using the wood splitter directly on top of the drains so soon after we had to replace a collapsed and perma-blocking section would quite possibly cause another drain collapse. OH sees sense there and retreats to the patio where I've set up my workshop.
We need to develop better collaboration there because right now, we're getting in each other's way, and that is not ideal where swinging axes and mallets are involved.
Now, however, OH has developed a very sore back and begged off wood splitting today, after work. I did a couple of hours though -- with pitiful results, it has to be said, because so many of my logs had knots and were incredibly hard and put up quite a fight before they split. That wood grenade is brilliant though. I'll have to get myself some decent gear -- Kevlar shin protection against tragically unbroken axe swings, steel-capped boots for when the fat log halves fall off and onto my toes (ow...), helmet and eye protection shield.
When I'm done, and if my back holds -- feels okay so far -- I could turn this into a regular instead-of-gym event. Tonight, as I was malleting away, driving that iron wedge deeper and deeper into a particularly stubborn log, P came back from work, HIS day over, peeked over the fence and laughed his backside off at me: "My God, the labour you're putting into all of this." -- "Yes, true," I said, "and next year I may well have enough of the whole thing and buy all this labour instead, but for now, this is my gym, my relaxation, especially since I'll have to carry on working with my head until about nine tonight."
OH has scouted even more wood for us: a bloke came round, freelance tree surgeon touting for business and asking if we wanted our birch tree sorted out. "No," OH told him, "we'll do that ourselves but do you have any waste wood?"
Turns out Mr Chainsaw has to pay someone to get shot of his cuttings each day so he was more than delighted when OH said "We're in the market for firewood." and he made the deal to offload wood he cuts -- for free -- whenever he's in the area, which is a lot.
It also means I need to get a move on to clear the 2 cbm of massive tree trunks from our driveway so that all this new stuff can go there!
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