Winter

Today we had the first measurable snowfall of the season. It wasn't much, just a couple of centimeters, but it was very beautiful. Snow is pretty rare in this part of the country, so I have to take what I can get. What I miss more than the frequency of snow is the street hockey games that could actually be played on ice in the old home and the speed sledding down my driveway when we moved here.

I'm a Lumberjack and that's OK

On my way home two days ago I got a call from my wife saying a big tree fell down in our front yard and was blocking our driveway. We had winds around 65 - 80 km/hr (40-50 mph) all day following two days of drenching rain. I scurried home and there it was, a a 20 meter tall tree snapped off at about the 2-3 meter mark. Another one of our "glorious" short-needle pines that are so susceptible to the pine borers. This thing weighed a ton and we had to figure out how to move it so that we could at least use the driveway. There was one very long section that I cut into three pieces. The center part was the only one now blocking the way. There was no easy way to move it, though ... it weighed a ton. Finally I hooked a chain around it and pulled it some with the trailer hitch on my SUV (this is one good reason to have an SUV!). Finally we got it to where my son and I could roll it to the edge of the driveway where it still sits. I spent yesterday morning getting the top of the tree off my neighbor's brick mailbox (it survived nicely) and this afternoon I will spend part of a vacation day trying to cut up the rest.

I was amazed that nobody stopped to offer help (one neighbor did much later). In my old neighborhood we would have had 5-6 guys all over that tree with chain saws and it would have been fairly quick work. Nobody even stopped to ask what was going on. It caught me off guard, but I think I figured it out. Everybody in this "city" hires out everything. I guess they saw me working and thought I might be the hired help (folks in this place don't make friends easily). It was a bit eye-opening.