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weld holds in the wind
Friday, December 16 2011
It had been balmy and warm last night, which had given Uptown Kingston an unusually festive and social quality for this time of year. That all ended at some point during the night, when howling winds heralded the approach of a more seasonably-frigid airmass. I still wasn't confident in the weld I'd made to attach a loop to the end of the bolt passing through the White Pine immediately north of the house, the bulldozer-damaged tree most likely to be blown down onto something I (or someone else) would then have to fix (perhaps including myself). The loop with the questionable weld is attached to a cable that runs to the base of a hickory tree some forty of fifty feet further north, and I installed it after Tropical Storm Irene in hopes of eliminating southward as a direction the tree might go when it decides to fall (eastward and southeastward already having been eliminated by a cable I strung up a couple years ago). So when I got up to piss, I went to have a look at the White Pine, but all seemed to be well. It was thrashing about with much less abandon than its neighbors, so it seemed the cables were doing their job (as was my weld).
The winds had died down by this morning and the clouds had mostly blown away, augmenting last night's fire with a measure of passive solar heat (possible even in these, the darkest days of Solar Winter). Unfortunately, though, I had some kind of gut complaint not unlike the one I'd suffered from when I'd drunk too much orange juice and booze during my recent stay in Virginia. I'd drunk booze last night, of course, but not an exceptional amount. But perhaps I just can't drink like I used to.
At some point today I overcame my discomfort and did a few outdoor activities, the lack of which might be the actual source of my physical and emotional malaise. I dealt with some humanure issues down at the brownhouse, clearing out the not-in-current-use trashcan by shoveling its contents into my drum composter (which is now completely full). I then scouted out a possible route for a cable tramway allowing me to easily lift loads of firewood from the Stick Trail up to the woodshed (which is on the terrace above). In past years I've had to carry wood in armloads up a set of steps, but ultimately I'd like to have an efficient alternative to this possibly-dangerous job (imagine slipping on a crust of snow while carrying an armload of heavy pieces of wood).
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