The New Tom Sawyer

I know you're thinking - where has he been? No words of wisdom lately? Too stressed out by the Winter Holidays to write? Well, actually I've been chopping wood. Yes really. Last Saturday my brother Alex, his neighbor Chris and I went out to the suburbs and worked all day to turn a bunch of former trees into (mostly) usable fire logs.

I noticed the piles of wood the first time I was out in Elkins Park at Julies' house (She's my sister-in-Laws' sister). That was almost a year ago and I've been wanting to cut it up ever since. I don't particularly need a lot of wood - I don't have too many fires and I really don't have a great place to keep a bunch of wood, but it just seemed like it would be so much fun to make a bunch of logs into smaller logs. It became a major operation wherein my brother and I had to rent a gas powered "Log Splitter" and then a truck to tow it and to haul all the wood. I ended up putting everything on my credit card ( I'll be reimbursed for most of it). My brother was helping even though he doesn't have a fire place- he's just being a nice guy. Yes, I do mean my brother Alex. I guess he liked the idea of using a manly machine like a log splitter too. Julie's husband Nigel came out to help us as well- and probably to make sure we didn't do any more damage than necessary to his property.

A log splitter is a fairly simple machine - and that's good because none of us had ever used one before. Its basically an I- beam with a pneumatic cylinder attached on top and attached to the cylinder is a fairly sharp steel wedge. You power it up - its kind of loud, but not chain saw loud- you place the wood on one side of the beam and then you pull the handle and the wedge s l o w l y makes it way over and splits it in half. I thought it was going to be something faster like a log guillotine kind of thing. This thing wasn't all that dangerous. We hardly needed the extra eye protection we got. It was kind of fun though- for like the first two hours. Then it go monotonous. We just kept splitting the logs down to a fireplace size. Some of the logs were so big we could split them into 8-10 firelogs. A lot of nice wood too, some Cherry I'm told, some pine maybe- I think some birch. It really smelled great- kind of like a Christmas tree lot.

We got into a rhythm of lifting, splitting and re-splitting and then tossing and stacking the logs. We even made Nigel sing the Monty Python Lumberjack song- he's English so it sounded very authentic. He seemed to know the lyrics pretty well.

We ended up with more than enough wood for everybody. Probably a few cords worth at least. Everyone always likes to talk about cords of fire wood but no one is really sure what a cord is. For all I know I should be spelling it with a "K". Alex says a cord is two piles of logs stacked four feet high and twelve feet long and they usually sell you a "face cord" of fire wood which is just one stack, not two. Anyway, we didn't weigh or measure anything and I'm not sure at all how much wood we got, but I do know I missed my regular Saturday nap and I have a pile of logs I should probably move from my front hallway. So if you need a few logs, don't hesitate to ask. I cut it myself.