The Stump

Be careful what you wish for.

I had another guy come yesterday afternoon, with his manager, his girlfriend lol.

To take down the ten foot maple stump.  He had a bigger longer saw.  Yet still, it took a couple hours.

He too was afraid of which way it could fall, despite the rope I still had on the top, for someone to pull it from outside the cat yard.

So he dorked around about it until his manager demanded he get it done.

There were breaks for him to fill the saw tank with more gas, go drink from a beer he had somewhere, this and that.  His manager fumed and laughed.  I broke into a sweat.  I'm of the old fashioned opinion apparently that beer and chain saws don't mix well.

So there's still a stump out there, standing tall at about three feet.  But seven feet of its gone now.  Or down I should say.  It is definitely not gone.   That is up to me.  That wood is heavy and the pieces huge, since he ran out of gas when he was cutting those chunks up and couldn't cut anymore.

The disaster that was about to happen, probably would have happened this winter, with that tree, was evident when the top piece of the 7 feet cut, fell and split open.  That top piece was where two of the larger trunks split off.  This maple grew not with one main trunk but at four feet, had V'd out into three trunks that would then V out into more.  That top piece off which two major trunks grew out was rotted half through.  The "V"'s would catch debris and rot, creating the danger that had caused branch after branch to fall unexpectedly.  These two half rotted through major trunks carried such weight and multiple branches above them that also had "V'ed" out into more and more, well anything underneath where they fell including my garage, would have been history.  So happy my brother had it cut a few months back.

Here's the aftermath.

This piece alone probably weighs 450 lbs.

I thought I'd need now to put up a couple posts in the yard with a cross piece of maybe a 2x4 to hold up the wire but I don't.  Just the pvc pole although I will get a piece of hardware to hold it in place on the stump.  Easy!  But how to get all those heavy wood pieces out of the yard now.  Do I really have to wait til they half rot?

The cats don't mind all the stumps.

Kona has found the other maple hideaway.   That stump is still standing at 8 feet with runners that grow each spring, creating the hideout at the top.

The wood cutter's manager joked the cat yard is now about the most dangerous yard around, for obstacles.  We joked that OSHA people would have heart attacks to see it.  She said imagine a burglar in the dark breaking in through the cat yard.  Yeah, I said, he'd be in the hospital a very long time!   We laughed and laughed.  But seriously, I need to get some of that wood out of there.

When I returned Chevron, the buff orange female, to her Waterloo owners Tuesday, they relinquished her only kitten, a darling little torti.  Yesterday, Heartland took her in.  I was very relieved and happy.

That's what we white trash do around here, fix things with zip ties, duct tape and pvc.   The cat yard is held together with zip ties, held up with pvc I found somewhere and had used first for other things and duct tape now holds together a lot of the tools I have to repair broken things.  A lot of those tools I found originally or got at the dollar store, like my favorite wood saw.  It actually has a good enough metal blade that I can sharpen its teeth on my sharpening stone.  Once I saw a hand saw in the middle of the road and fortunately could stop and grab it up.  I've been lucky that way.  I am super happy I don't have to dig out two post holes and buy a couple 4x4 posts and a twelve foot cross 2x4.  The price of wood is out of this world right now.  Even here in Oregon, where trees grow like grass.  And often fall, like some giant playful cat in the sky, reaches a paw out and pushes them over.

Sure I lust when I look at those chunks of maple and think oh my, if I had a milling saw, I'd make things of those stumps, or just lumber pieces, or rounds.  "If I only had....." is a dangerous place to go in my mind.  My nephew told me he is looking at a piece of property that has timber and would build a house on it for him and his wife, and cut the timber and mill it into lumber himself, says a small personal miller that pulls on a trailer can cost as little as $4000.   I think "What?  $4k? That isn't a small amount."  I suppose to some it is, especially if you're building a house and can cut out your own lumber for it from your own trees, saving a whole lot of mula.

Here's a personal sawmill for instance.  You still have to have a lot of other equipment, like chainsaws and a way to move heavy logs around, too.   So, mula time, big time.