Refresher

The Shawnee National Forest is hosting a Helicopter Crew Member class this week. I have been through it before, and attended today for the Long Line Refresher portion of the class. Quite a few forestry students from SIU-Carbondale are taking the class. This is a great opportunity for students who want to work fire details out west. The pay is much better than for grunt firefighters, and the extra training makes them more valuable come job - hunting time.

Spring Is Getting Closer

The Easter Bunny stopped by a few days ago to work on a recipe in our kitchen. Spring surely is just around the corner.

Poets'Corner

Toilet Seats

While I am emulating Keats
My brother fabrics toilet seats,
The which, they say, are works of art,
Aesthetic features of the mart;
So exquisitely are they made
With plastic of a pastel shade,
Of topaz, ivory or rose,
Inviting to serene repose.

Rajahs I'm told have seats of gold,--
(They must, I fear, be very cold).
But Tom's have thermostatic heat,
With sympathy your grace to greet.
Like silver they are neon lit,
Making a halo as you sit:
Then lo! they play with dulcet tone
A melody by Mendelssohn.

Oh were I lyrical as Yeats
I would not sing of toilet seats,
But rather serenade a star,--
Yet I must take things as they are.
For even kings must coyly own
Them as essential as a throne:
So as I tug the Muse's teats
I envy Tom his toilet seats.


From: Rhymes For My Rags by Robert W Service 1956

Weekend Steam

Here are a couple of snapshots from an old family album which were taken in 1952. The location is Mt. Pleasant, Iowa at the Midwest Old Settlers and Threshers reunion. The engine is a Russell and it is operating a Prony brake. The gentleman in the hat next to the brake is Milo Matthews, one of the founders of Old Threshers. I was fortunate to become acquainted with Milo when I began attending Old Threshers regularly in the mid 1960's.

Crankin' It Up

This Friday night's selection is a comedy song performed by Billy Murray. Mr. Murray began his entertainment career in 1893, was in minstrel and vaudeville shows, and recorded songs into the 1940's. His voice was a perfect match for the acoustic recording media, and on this record you will note that you can understand every word easily.

Hinges Again

Some of the earlier Chainsaw posts on this blog tell about setting up the hinge for dropping a tree where you want it. This tree was a large maple which had split and become a hazard to a parking area on a farm. The tree had to be felled in two separate operations because the stem had split, but first I had to take off a heavy side limb to regain some balance. In this first photo you can see the open face and the bore cut, which together establish a hinge.

Cutting through the back strap dropped the limb neatly as planned.

Here you can see the two parts of the stem which had split apart. I made open face cuts on both parts, bored the one on the right and dropped it, then did the same on the bigger portion on the left.

This is the view from another angle. The tree was still fairly solid, but rot was making headway. It is to your advantage to take down a tree before it is rotten. The operation is safer and more predictable.

You can see some fiber pull in the hinge; that's because the hinge is a bit thicker than necessary. I left it on thick side because this stem had an unbalanced crown, and a thicker hinge is less likely to fail. Fiber pull is a problem if you are cutting trees for lumber, because it ruins the lower end of the boards cut out of the butt log. Fiber pull does not matter when you are taking down hazardous trees, or firewood. This picture shows the advance of rot through the stem as a result of the fork splitting off.

Good Old Days

History has many references to poisonings of both good and bad people. Wives in America did not always have divorce as a resource to escape a bad marriage, and numerous nasty husbands conveniently croaked in the not too distant past. You have probably been asking yourself, " How could a woman obtain arsenic to get rid of the bum, without casting suspicion onto herself?"

Here is the handy dandy answer for the woman who needs a discreet way out of a dead-end marriage.

It hasn't been too many years ago that the average housewife was constantly fighting flies from the horses, cows, and pigs around the homestead. This product would raise no eyebrows when purchased at the general store, and if it happened to be dipped in the old boy's coffee while he was out doing the morning milking, no-one would be the wiser. This sample was in a box of plunder we bought at a farm auction years ago. It is behind glass, and I check it every morning when I pour my coffee.

Midwest Weather Update

Not Monday AGAIN!

Back to the old grind.

Poets' Corner

Random Thoughts From Archie:

archy on this and that

an old stomach
reforms more whiskey drinkers
than a new resolve
and the sexton
stops more than either

a man who is so dull
that he can learn only by personal experience
is too dull to learn
anything important by experience

a great many people
who spend their time mourning
over the brevity of life
could make it seem longer
if they did a little more work

judging by the number and variety
of pills and religions in the world
the chief preoccupation of man
has been the state of his digestion
and the condition of his soul
and just look at both of them

From: the lives and times of archy & mehitabel by don marquis; doubleday doran & co. inc. garden city, new york, 1933