I had a good day today.

From 7:30 until 2 in the afternoon, I had what's got to be the perfect job. It was outside in the sunshine, it didn't involve hard labor, and it meant I got to use a really powerful machine I don't have to pay to maintain.

I took photographs, but unfortunately they seem to be visiting the Horsehead Nebula at the moment. So just pretend that right now you're looking at a big tractor with a backhoe on one side and a forklift WAAAAY out in front of the other. On the forklift is a gigantic pile of chaotically untrimmed tree cuttings.

Got it? Okay: to resume...

Yesterday I worked all day in D&L's meadow with a chainsaw, and only covered the little juniper grove in one corner. Juniper is an untidy tree: I understand that some live for millennia, but they do it by dying in parts. An apparently perfectly-healthy juniper might have a single ball of green stuff, tacked onto an enormous corpse that's been dead so long it's rotten and worm-eaten. The wood never grows straight, and I'll bet 90% of what I cut yesterday is junk and kindling. For that reason, a grove of old junipers can take up an awful lot of space even though most of it is dead and seasoned wood. Wood that makes the most fantastic firewood, even if you don't usually get a lot of it per tree. And you can cut all you want without harming a single tree.

Anyway, yesterday I cut it and today I had to deliver it. L has this tractor which is the very apple of her eye. She's more than generous about lending herself out with it, to dig a footer or a grave or a trench or whatever, but I never thought I'd see the day when she'd let anybody else use it. But the problem was, if she wanted the job done that was the way it had to be. Picking up and piling all this wood was almost an all-day job with the tractor, and without the tractor it would have taken much more time and labor than I would have been willing to do for any price they'd have been willing to pay. D&L are both tied up full-time on their house project, so she decided before they even offered me the gig that it would involve me being permitted into the Holy of Holies.

Hee hee...I like tractors. I also used to get a kick out of driving the company's forklift. A tractor WITH a forklift? I'd have done this part for laughs.

It took a lot longer than expected because there was a LOT of wood! (Imagine that at this moment you're looking at a very long and impressive wood pile, approximately four feet high.) I didn't really have a good idea, yesterday, just how much wood I cut. I cut a LOT. No wonder I was so wasted.