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Charlotte's dead rabbit
Monday, October 28 2024
I've been getting up after 9:00am of late, which is also pretty much what Gretchen does. But at this time of year, that wastes a lot of valuable daylight, which is essential for outdoor projects. So this morning I got up at a little after 7:30am and did my first firewood gathering of the year. We'd be going to Rochester in a few days and wanted to leave a nice indoor firewood supply for Fern and her boyfriend, who would be housesitting for us. The indoor wood rack was completely empty, and I hadn't put any effort into firewood gathering anywhere in months (the most recent firewood gathering I'd done had been back in the early spring at the Adirondack cabin). So I set off with the big Kobalt chainsaw (which I'd just brought back from the cabin) and my firewood hauling backpack. I didn't have to go far to get good ready-to-burn firewood; for the months the dogs and I have been having to step over a fairly large fallen white ash only a couple hundred feet south of the house down the Stick Trail, well before even the Chamomile. I bucked five or six pieces out of it, the battery on the saw died, and I went and swapped the battery, this time using the big battery from the lawnmower (which also fits the chainsaw but sticks up out of it) and continued bucking. I then went several hundred feet southward down the Stick Trail and found a modest fallen red oak to cut up. But its moisture content seemed a bit high, so I didn't up taking all that many of its pieces. I kept my first backpack load pretty light, as it takes awhile to develop the necessary core body strength to handle loads of a 100 pounds or more. The white ash pieces were so close that I carried a fair number of them home just in my arms, as loading up the backpack is a bit of a chore. But it's much easier to haul pieces using it; I can carry three huge pieces with it and doesn't feel that difficult. But carrying just two such pieces using only my arms is exhausting.
After I'd processed all the ash and oak and piling it up in the indoor rack, I thought I should add some fast-burning pine to the pile. So I went out again with the chainsaw, this time finding a fairly thin but quite tall skeletonized standing white pine even closer to the house than the fallen white ash had been. I cut it down and bucked it into pieces. They were so light that they must've contained very little moisture. One long unbucked piece from the tree was so light I just carried it back to near the house and cut it up there. I then gathered a bunch of small sticks, with the idea being that Fern won't have to go gather anything when she wants to start a fire.
Next I turned my attention to the solar panel refurbishment project. Today I wanted to "fix" the broken glass on the second and fourth panes from the west, the latter of which broke fairly recently and was in four separate pieces. (The second pane broke while I was installing it back in May, 2019.) I removed one of the pieces so I could help a live wasp escape from the bottom of the panel (by then overcast skies and cleared and the sun was out, but near the bottom of the pannel it wasn't too hot). I also scooped out the bleached corpses of a good many hornets and the second unfortunate tree frog I'd found in there. Then I covered the edges of the glass with silicone caulk and fitted them together, using short wooden props under the glass to hold it above the hot metal plate below in places. This was a maddeningly messy job, but I was able to close all the cracks this way, which hopefully will keep me from needing a replacement pane for at least a few years. Later I used the same caulk to seal the two cracks in pane #2 as well; I'd originally "fixed" that one with tape, all of which had long since cracked up and eroded away, allowing water into the panel and causing the rot I'd seen of the OSB backing material.
That all ended up going so well that I celebrated by taking Charlotte and Neville for a walk. Both of them came, but early in the walk Charlotte came running from somewhere with the floppy corpse of a dead rabbit in her mouth. I don't know if she killed it or scavenged it (she's definitely fast enough to catch a rabbit, unlike whomever Elvis Presley was singing to in "Hound Dog"), but her insistence on running around with it some distance ahead of Neville seemed to be to show off. (Neville really has never caught a rabbit.) As we often do, we went up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail and then short-cut over to the Stick Trail, and along the way I added stones to the stone wall and the ramped entrance to the mountain goat path leading up to our woodshed.
After doing a little more on the solar deck just to make the panel super secure for the next week or more, I took off all my clothes and cut my hair with a pair of orange-handled scissors out in the driveway, throwing the clippings into the weeds for any creatures to use for nest making or to improve their hibernacula. Then I showered to get all the little prickly hair segments off me.
Since Gretchen has come to expect me to make dinners on the days she works at the bookstore, I made a spaghetti using rigati spaghetti, tofu, crimini mushrooms, and onions.
Nearly all the firewood I collected today (two pieces went in the woodshed). The split pieces are mostly white ash and the round pieces on the top are white pine.
Click to enlarge.
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