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Feb. 18th, 2009 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI managed to get some more big pieces made into little pieces (working on the huge hunks of maple and ash from M's yard that are now great hulking things in my yard) today even though we were having wintery mix (basically means "You will get some precip. We do not know what the precip will be like because temperatures will be at or near freezing and you could get any of a wide variety of crappy options.") all the while. Day Two of physical activity is always a lot less fun than Day One.
* Act of splitting wood made abdominals screech in pain the first twenty or so times. Then things improved as everything warmed up. My shoulders and that weird muscle on the underneath of the upper arms (triceps, says wikipedia), those were fine, slightly sore was all. Abdominals were complaining like a mofo, though. For some reason, splitting wood works the living shit out of the high abdominals on me.
* Proper form when one is tired and/or sore means one can still split wood even if one cannot hit very hard. Also, proper form hurts less. Yay for proper form!
* Splitting wood left-handed (left hand is higher up on the maul, the hand used for aiming and for keeping the maul straight) is harder than doing it right-handed but also uses different, less-tired muscles. I'll have to remember to alternate sides in the future. Maybe my left-handed aim will improve if I practice more. That'd be nice.
* I do not really like ash. (This is not particularly fair. Thing is, I adore red oak. It is a fantastic wood. It splits where I want it to split. It smells good. It burns for a long time and makes fantastic coals. There is a lot of heat in red oak. Every other wood that I work with is invariably compared to red oak and all of it falls short of being red oak. Ash is probably a very nice wood. It's just not red oak. It is also not willow, which is my least-favorite wood ever being appallingly heavy when green, a ghastly shade of orange-pink, difficult to light *and* fast to burn up, and possessed of an impossibly weak grain on spongy shitty wood that doesn't split for beans. Willow is a trainwreck on the firewood front.)
* Somewhere along the line, there is going to have to be a lot of stacking going on. Right now, I'm just kind of piling the little pieces off to the side, out of the way. This is because I do not want to have to try to add to the woodpile at the same time that I'm carefully deconstructing the woodpile. (I'm being neater than usual this year, going for a season of not-having-to-clean-up-the-woodpile. Go me! So far, it's looking pretty OK and I'm more than halfway through heating season.) I also don't know how on earth I am going to stack these wee little hunks of proto-wood. They're not even log sized. Logs are sixteen inches long. These things are like eight or ten inches long. They're absurd. Maybe if I stack them double-wide on top of real logs...
And now, I'm off to support the economy by buying various strange legumes. Yay!
* Act of splitting wood made abdominals screech in pain the first twenty or so times. Then things improved as everything warmed up. My shoulders and that weird muscle on the underneath of the upper arms (triceps, says wikipedia), those were fine, slightly sore was all. Abdominals were complaining like a mofo, though. For some reason, splitting wood works the living shit out of the high abdominals on me.
* Proper form when one is tired and/or sore means one can still split wood even if one cannot hit very hard. Also, proper form hurts less. Yay for proper form!
* Splitting wood left-handed (left hand is higher up on the maul, the hand used for aiming and for keeping the maul straight) is harder than doing it right-handed but also uses different, less-tired muscles. I'll have to remember to alternate sides in the future. Maybe my left-handed aim will improve if I practice more. That'd be nice.
* I do not really like ash. (This is not particularly fair. Thing is, I adore red oak. It is a fantastic wood. It splits where I want it to split. It smells good. It burns for a long time and makes fantastic coals. There is a lot of heat in red oak. Every other wood that I work with is invariably compared to red oak and all of it falls short of being red oak. Ash is probably a very nice wood. It's just not red oak. It is also not willow, which is my least-favorite wood ever being appallingly heavy when green, a ghastly shade of orange-pink, difficult to light *and* fast to burn up, and possessed of an impossibly weak grain on spongy shitty wood that doesn't split for beans. Willow is a trainwreck on the firewood front.)
* Somewhere along the line, there is going to have to be a lot of stacking going on. Right now, I'm just kind of piling the little pieces off to the side, out of the way. This is because I do not want to have to try to add to the woodpile at the same time that I'm carefully deconstructing the woodpile. (I'm being neater than usual this year, going for a season of not-having-to-clean-up-the-woodpile. Go me! So far, it's looking pretty OK and I'm more than halfway through heating season.) I also don't know how on earth I am going to stack these wee little hunks of proto-wood. They're not even log sized. Logs are sixteen inches long. These things are like eight or ten inches long. They're absurd. Maybe if I stack them double-wide on top of real logs...
And now, I'm off to support the economy by buying various strange legumes. Yay!
