Janis and I spent a romantic day cleaning up a pile of wood from a few elm trees we cut down last fall. Quality time indeed. Actually it was a good feeling to get the work taken care of – it’s been looming over us for a while. I splurged and rented a log splitter for this project since elm is horrendous to split. We spent from 9:AM till 10:00 PM reducing the large rounds to fodder ready for the stove. Matthew got in on the act too. The last few hours we used the lights of our 4wheeler to see by (I wanted to get all the use out of the splitter we could since we were paying for it!). This picture was taken in early afternoon and the pile got quite a bit larger. Now we’ll have to haul it over to the house and stack it up nice. Sometime next month we’ll probably still make one trip to the mountains to cut a load (3-4 cord) of Lodgepole Pine to fatten up the woodpile. We generally try to keep two years worth of wood in the wood yard, but we did not gather any last year so the area could get cleaned up. It now needs replenished. I love to see large piles of firewood behind the garage because I know we’ll be toasty no matter what the weather or the economy does.

Allen