Beyond the Roundels

I am getting ahead on it finally. Finally! 

Sunday, I baked which turned out very well. More pita bread, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, granola, yogurt and blueberry muffins (bars? It's the blueberry muffin recipe but in a square pan because I can't be bothered to clean a muffin tin or silicon molds and I hate the paper). Delicious all around. I realized I was missing some key flours for two other recipes I planned to do, so I put them off. 

I worked Monday instead because it was better weather for sure, plowed the wood splitting area and some other small preparation tasks. Then that afternoon, my dad and I went up on the back hill and he cut down two basswood trees in a hedgerow. According to a website on the internet (who has never been wrong ever), basswood is a hot fast burner, which is perfect for maple syrup. He limbed them while I went down the hill to do more prep work and brought one down before dark. I greased, added oil to the wood splitter and fueled the bobcat, then ran it down the road to the pile of logs there. Nothing more hilarious than driving a skidsteer on the road that has a top speed of about 2mph. No that's not a typo. It's a solid easy walking speed. Takes forever to get anywhere. 

Tuesday morning I had a doctors appointment for a pap smear, less said about that, the better. I won't need to get another until 2031 thank fucking god. (hey fucked up thing is that anyone on medicare can't be seen at a planned parenthood in PA starting in two weeks even if we pay out of pocket except for some STD screening. what the fuck) Since I was up in the city, I stopped by Wegmans for sweet rice flour and millet flour since they have more esoteric stuff and also picked up some other misc things that are harder to get. I also stopped by Michaels to do one last search for yarn to match my aunt's blanket and found one very close color and one kinda close color. My order from Bulk Foods also came in that day, a restock on sorghum flour and tapioca starch. I'm going through quite a bit of those right now since I'm baking so much. Right now it's my best bet for larger quantities, I haven't figured out a buying co-op in this area yet although I'd love to. I'm getting low on gluten free oats, usually I have a 25lb bag on hand and it's almost out. 

Tuesday afternoon I hooked up the wood splitter properly and got to splitting. This was outdoor burner wood, oak logs that are decently green but we can put some real crap green wood through the burner and it does fine. I split a dump trailer full which is 8ft wide by 12ft long by 4ft high. It's really nice, I can just pop the end of the splitter over top of the trailer and most of the logs fall right into the trailer. This will last 1.5 to 2 weeks which is great. 

This morning, I dropped two dead trees down in the woods for indoor stove wood. It made me pretty nervous to drop a tree myself, especially dead ones but they were small and I was careful. Probably too careful as I used a wedge and that made the whole thing go over in the wedge's direction really easily rather than the hinge. But! The tree didn't hit me or anything else and it was fine. (what wasn't fine is that I realized several hours later that both of my parents weren't on the farm, so I was doing dangerous things all by myself with no one around. great! very safe!) I cut that all up plus half of another log that has been sitting in the woods for who knows how long. But it was still in decent condition. After lunch, I went back down and split it all, then grabbed the dump trailer and loaded it up. I did run the tractor out of fuel (oops) but it made me remember that the dash dials don't actually work on it. I was able to bleed it pretty easily, the hardest part of the whole process was walking up to the house to fetch my truck to bring fuel back down. Safety toes are great on boots, but walking in the snow in them is so slow. 

That's probably two weeks of indoor stove wood, currently dumped in a pile but I loaded about half of it into the tote already and I'll do the rest in the next day or two. I'll hopefully go work on the rest of that big log and get a bunch more, plus some other trees I know are down in the woods in the next week or so.

Indoor wood. Very left hand part of the photo you can see the pile of outdoor burner wood since the burner is just left of where this picture shows. There's an overhang there to keep the wood out of the weather. 



To finish off the day, I cut up the basswood tree that my dad brought down the hill. I'll split that tomorrow, nice and small. I've got an audiobook due in three days, so I plan to listen to that. Then probably do another load of outdoor burner wood with the skidsteer in the afternoon and dump that next to the burner. Then I can split it into a heap to help it dry. 

Basswood log cut up



It has been such nice weather these last two days, 28F but incredibly sunny. There has been a little bit of wind that brings the feels like down to 20F but it's really warm compared to the last two weeks. I've been removing layers as I work! It's going to be cold again this weekend, so I'm trying to push through and get as much done as I can.