All Split Up...

Well not exactly all, but starting to make a dent in all the wood that was bucked up from that giant double spruce tree that the power line crew cut down.

After hauling several loads up from the power line, been splitting it with the hydraulic splitter.

Seems like a lot, but that's just from a portion of the smaller tree. Likely will have 3-4 times that much when finished splitting the bigger tree. Just last week I was worrying about not having enough wood for the winter, well not so much now. But I did get out a couple of times on the 850T, it ran great and gas leak's fixed, so that was pretty good too.

April Weather Summary...

Here's the weather summary for April. The average temperature for the month was 30.5° which was 2.0° below normal. The high was 54° on the 15th while the low was -5° on the 8th. Total precipitation was 1.3" which was 1.0" above normal. Snowfall totaled 8" and the end of the month depth was 12". Summary from NWS with the UAF GI climate chart.

All Spruced Up...

Well not exactly, down is more likely. The spruce bark beetle infestation that hit southern Alaska a while back has apparently made it's way here. We have several large spruce that died over the winter and needed to be removed. Since a couple were near the power line, we called the local electric service and they came out and dropped them.

While they did a good job dropping the trees, they still had to be bucked up and hauled away, so that's my job.

This was a pretty impressive tree; it was kind of sad to see it go.

The logs were so big you could only get three at a time into the bucket.  But they also dropped some small birch that apparently were in the way, so used them to fill the load. Lots of firewood!

Social Distancing...

Saw some funny signs for the so-called social distancing that we're supposed to do to avoid close contact with the Covid virus.

Apparently this is being used in parts of Canada as an official information sign.

This one is from a restaurant in Chicago. Trubisky is the Bear's quarterback, who had a less than stellar performance last year.

This was posted on another blog, it didn't say where it was from.

Spring has sprung...

Last week there was still a foot of snow on the ground and it got below freezing every morning, so it hardly seemed like spring. This week it's been getting up to near sixty, the snow's mostly gone, and the mosquitos are coming out, a sure sign of spring!

The road is already dry and all the water's running in the ditches. Most years this would still be a muddy mess with the snowmelt runoff going down the road. But thanks to my neighbor, who got his track Bobcat going and cleared all the hard packed snow off the road, the water's where it belongs.

Just cleared the snow off the upper dog yard a couple of weeks ago (previous post) and now it's dry enough to move them up to their summer spot. They seem very happy to get out of the muddy part of the  yard.

The old Ski Doo is getting a new magneto, throttle cable, and pull start rope. As soon as that's done, it's back to working on the 650 Guzzi. Fortunately the 850T is ready to go for a ride, maybe tomorrow?