Tuesdaily Brief: Batman in braids

[ellenmillion]

Batman liked her braids:



Another successful swim class, with dunking of the face under water, and a few tentative bubbles (and lots of requests for "Ring around the rosey?"). She's quite alright with the instructor taking her for a while now.

I? Am stacking wood for the winter!

I actually really enjoy this task - it is very rewarding to find just the right spot to nest a weird-shaped piece of wood so that it all fits together into one solid, perfect stack. It is also feels good being able to tame a giant, messy, haphazard heap into something orderly and logical, and to think about how many amazing fires this will be as I haul yet another heaping wheelbarrow over. It is very green wood, and so sappy it looks like it's been drizzled in honey in places; I have a sneaking suspicion that my stack is going to glue itself into one giant omni-log, like some kind of bizarre log laminate material.

I tried yesterday to take some photos of the leaves falling - there was a beautiful swirly storm of them briefly! The photos do not capture the feeling and sound and swirl very well, however. I will post the best of them later.

Comments

[kelkyag]

Bat-braids! Do they double as climbing rope and lassos? :)

Making order and laying in supplies are both very satisfying, indeed.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

They are a liiiiiittle too short and fine for climbing or lassoing. :P

[kelkyag]

Those delicate-looking fibers are stronger than spider silk and are carefully folded up to conceal their length! :)

[pixiewildflower.livejournal.com]

Love the photo!

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

Oh, Gups! So cute and so quick to joy. I just LOVE her tiny braids. And your log stacking project DOES sound satisfying!! But tell me, what do you do if it DOES glue itself together? Also, if it's green... won't it be very smokey in the fireplace? Don't mind my idiocy...

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

If it glues together, I have a sledge hammer!

And it would be very smokey to burn wood this green, but we aren't planning to burn this batch until NEXT winter. We have a few pallets of spruce that we'll use this winter (mixed with dry birch), and the stuff I'm stacking now will be the following few winters - maybe even four years worth? We use about 25% spruce to 75% birch, because birch is all over our land and basically free, and the mix makes a better fire than all of just one or the other.

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

Aha! Very interesting!! And do you have a fireplace, or wood stove, or both? Is the air quality issue one that you guys deal with? Here there are certain days which people are encouraged to use pellets instead of wood in their stoves, because we're in a valley and the air just gets gross.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

We have a wood stove - it's much more efficient. Air quality is a big problem in the city proper, as it's down in a valley and the inversion when it's cold is REALLY bad. But we live up in the hills above the inversion, and out of the 'attainment zone'. Our woodstove is pretty modern, so it's got some fancy baffles and such that cut down on pollution, and we only burn completely dry wood (birch and spruce only) that isn't too bad. They issue local air quality alerts and ask people not to burn on certain days, but unfortunately, those days are almost always the REALLY COLD (like 40 below) days, so it's sort of futile because it's like asking people not to be warm. We have an oil Monitor furnace, for example, but if it's really cold out, it just can't keep the whole house warm. It's a big political kerfluffle in cycles.

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

Oh, I imagine so!

[puffbird.livejournal.com]

Can I just say... that I ALSO like chopping and stacking wood? It's one of the Chores From Childhood that I kind of miss. My parents' house has radiant heating in the floors, but even so they would use their fireplace (upstairs) and wood stove (downstairs) to heat the house in the winter, so they'd get a cord or two of wood every year. The delivery would get dumped in the driveway, and we'd have to quickly chop or move all the wood so we could park...

There's something mentally calming about the physical process of chopping wood and stacking it Just So. Kind of like Tetris.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

Jake actually wanted to help and I wouldn't let him. He admitted that while he would have gotten it done faster, it would not have been as excellently stacked. *preens*