Well. It's almost a year since I posted anything here. And this time it's not an ankle, it's pre-patellar bursitis... otherwise known as house-maids knee. I was doing some lifting and moving in the garage and must have bumped it. The snow blower needed to go to the back and the lawn mowers had to be brought forward. That damned Husqvarna snow blower is a hell of a difficult thing to move without the drive running. I know this is a bit mixed up, but so am I these days.

So I have a week or so to recover before it's tree felling time again. My... but the time goes by. It's Easter Sunday tomorrow and Good Friday was my birthday. The weather as usual is awful. It's dribbling down and there is a mist on our little meadow. Nearly all the snow has gone, as is the DNA cell phone network. We've been out of touch for days now and it seems that the base station has gone haywire. No one can get us by phone and we can't make calls. I'm relying on Skype now and since the quality is far better than the DNA service anyway, it's no problem for outgoing calls.

If the service is not restored by Tuesday I'm going to the city to change over to another service, Sonera I think. They seem to know what they're doing because our DSL network is quite good.

Happy Easter to anyway who happens to see this

Forestry

All the felling has been done and about 1/4 of the wood has already been brought up to the shed and split. My ankle is okay now although I think the damage to the connectives is still healing. There is no snow and we've had a few very nice sunny days. Two duck (Mallard) have arrived and are busy on the pond by the house. Only one deer comes to feed now. He is growing nice antlers but is still very jumpy after the clear cutting on our border. The females will be giving birth soon. In a couple of months there will be young ones. To start with they are hidden very carefully by their mothers but will emerge around the end of July... I think.

I haven't repaired the chain saw. I bought a new Husqvarna; a little smaller than the old one but it seems to do the job.

Some hope!

So... I went into the forest yesterday after filling my old but good Husqvarna chain saw with fuel, tightening the chain and giving it a general once-over. I managed to walk without too much pain and started to saw up some trees that had been felled four weeks ago. After about six cuts through a 14" trunk the damned throttle jammed at full power. I couldn't fix it in the forest so I trudged back to the woodshed, slipped on the ice and twisted my already aching ankle again. That's the end of that. I can't even fix the saw because it's still too cold to work in the garage and I can't take the smelly thing into the house.

One thing I'd suspected for a long time turned out to be quite true. Ordinary rubber boots provide no support for the ankles whatsoever.

Healing

My foot is healing nicely. I can walk without much pain and hope to get back into the forest to finish the work I started tomorrow. The weather is improving. But although the sun shines most days it was well below -20C last night. Walking outside the house is fraught with danger especially for a semi-cripple like me. The surface often melts during the day, but each night new slick ice forms. I have ski-poles with sharp metal points that make it a little easier. In the forest moving about on the snow is no problem, even when toting a heavy chain saw.

A delay for recovery

In the middle of the tree felling exercise I've gone and damaged my left foot. The fifth metatarsal is fractured near the tuberosity and I'm not able to move about very well. It doesn't matter much because it's only March and I can go on cutting until the end of April. But the snow may be gone by then making it more difficult.

The clear-cutting on our border has been done and the story is here:

http://edfwill.jalbum.net/scratch3/

The machine is GPS controlled and was able to work very close to the border. The position of each tree cut is logged, for research purposes I suppose. The three deer that had taken up residence in our tiny forest have not returned. I guess the noise and activity was too much for them.

The huge stacks of logs are still lying in the field and unless they are taken away soon the ground will become too soft for the trucks.

Today I started my wood cutting. Each year I fell and cut up enough birch trees to last through the next winter. There is a batch, cut last spring that is already dry and will be moved to make space for the next lot. It's a nuisance to have to move the wood but it's the only way it can be done so that it can be easily loaded, in carriers, onto a sledge for transport to the house some 60 metres away.

Cutting the trunks into the short lengths to fit the stoves is easy when there is snow on the ground. The trunks can be cut up quickly and easily without needing to be lifted and supported so that the chain won't run into the ground by mistake. If this happens it will cut nothing more until it has been re-sharpened. A task that takes me more than half and hour and uses up one file. The chains are hard (some makes harder than others) and the files don't last long.

I cut down five 25 metre tall birches today and cut them up -- but somehow my chain went through the snow into the ground and it's sitting in the garage ready to be filed in the morning before I can start again.

Introduction

Some time ago -- when I was rather busy with other things -- I started a Blog. This Blog has vanished. I suppose not in reality, but virtually, because I don't know how to get at it, or even where it was created. And so I start again; this is not the first time I've started doing things over again.

To start the ball rolling I'll tell you about my morning. I looked out at about 06:00 and saw very little, but enough to observe that the three white tail deer, that usually come to feed on the oats my wife leaves for them, were not there. I was not overly surprised because there is a lot going on around us right now. We've had deer in the garden for a few years. On 20th of December 2007 there were a dozen of them outside the kitchen window at about noon. Since then they've come and gone regularly. I don't know if the local hunters group -- who shoot moose each season -- have killed any of them, but I hope not.

The reason I say I was not surprised is that a few days ago a local man was roaming around in our tiny forest with his Alsatian dog. We saw snowshoe tracks and the tracks of the dog as it followed the deer from the place they usually spend the night, into the nearest neighbor's land. And also another of the neighbors is felling trees -- on a large scale -- many hectares of mixed forest are being clear-cut and the noise and activity may drive the deer far away in any case.

This is a link to some snapshots of the deer taken through a rather dirty window:

http://picasaweb.google.com/don.donwilliams/OutOfTheKitchenWindowThisMorningDec202007#