Bucking is the term for cutting a tree into manageable chunks, generally firewood-sized. Yesterday we decided to buck the two trees that are laying in our backyard. Here’s the “before” shot of the one that clipped the house:
And here’s what it looks like after I took our chainsaw to it:
Pepper worked on the second tree, first limbing it with our little electric chainsaw and then bucking it with the big saw:
Now we have to take all these firewood-length logs and split them into useable sizes. Luckily we know a guy.
I also sliced a few thin cross-sections of the tree, because Thom and Katie are going to do something with them. Here’s an example of one that’s around 16 inches across:
Maybe I’ll make a few more into cutting boards or coasters or a clock or something. It’s really nice wood, and I hate for it to go to waste.
After the second windstorm, and receiving bids to have our trees felled and bucked (check out my tree lingo), we decided it would be cheaper to buy a chainsaw and do some of the work ourselves. Obviously we’re not about to fell a hundred-foot pine that’s leaning 30 degrees from vertical. But there are several smaller trees in the forest or near our driveway that we could probably take down. And those that are already on the ground just need to be bucked to stock our firewood pile.
So, chainsaw in hand, we headed out today to make some progress on the two trees still partially blocking our driveway. This thing was amazing— it cut through a 16-inch trunk like butter.
After maybe ten minutes of work, we’d cleared the first (big) tree in our driveway, and made short work of the smaller one afterward. Of course, the massive trunks are still laying in the yard, with ten-foot holes where the roots were, but that’s a problem for another day.
The sad thing is both trees were well over a century old, judging by their rings:
It’s a bummer that these giants stood for so long, only to give in right after we moved here. Stupid wind.
In September we had a crazy wind storm that took out three trees in our yard, including one that swiped the side of the house. Everyone told us this was unprecedented, including people who had lived in the area for thirty years or more.
Well, they say lightning strikes twice, but in this case it was the wind. The day before Thanksgiving we had a second wind storm that was just as fierce as the one two months earlier, except it lasted a full day. Winds gusted above 60 mph. We watched as trees in our yard swayed back and forth, tugging at the ground (you could actually see the ground heaving as the trees’ roots pulled at it). We were absolutely convinced that at least two of the trees were going to smash into the house, doing far more damage than the September storm because they were taller and closer to the house.
As it turned out, the enormous tree in our front yard tore loose and toppled. Pepper, Kyra, and I watched it fall (Pepper even caught it on video). It crashed through two trees downwind, clipping the top halves off both of them. The entire mess came crashing down into the driveway, and left a mammoth hole in the yard. Another tree fell across the next switchback in the driveway.
Here’s the tree laying across the yard. Note the huge boulder in the bottom right: that had been up at the roots of the tree (part of the landscaping along our sidewalk) and tumbled down the hill.
The wind howled all day and night. We hoped against hope that the two trees beside the house would hold. They did. When the wind finally abated on Thanksgiving, we surveyed the damage.
A tall pine beside the driveway collapsed. It didn’t damage anything, but it’s sad to lose such a pretty tree.
In our backyard, another tree had fallen (luckily not hitting anything at all). In the national forest behind us, we could see roughly a dozen trees down. Perhaps most precarious of all was the ponderosa pine leaning over our garage and the courtyard:
It’s at least a hundred feet tall. And yes, it’s really 30 degrees off vertical. If it collapsed, it would crush the garage and ruin the courtyard fence and much of the landscaping there. Luckily for us, the tree’s roots were holding and it was leaning slightly against an outcropping of rocks at the end of our driveway. When an arborist came to survey the damage, he told us confidently that the tree will hold for a little while. Taking it down will be a trick, but he should be able to do it with a bucket truck, sawing off the upper portion. That’ll be something to see.
There are five other trees in our yard that are “compromised” (in his words) and endangering the house. If we don’t remove them, the next wind storm will certainly take them down and crunch the house. All told, there’s around six thousand dollars of cutting and dismantling to be done. Atop that, there’s probably four thousand dollars of cleanup as we remove the massive root balls and fill the gaping holes with topsoil. Ouch.
Needless to say, it was a stressful day, but in the end the house wasn’t hit. I have friends who experienced much worse, with dozens of trees down and damage to their houses. The place across the street has a hundred-and-fifty-foot tree laying across its roof, and three others down in the backyard. Power lines up and down the highway were taken out by falling limbs. It looks like a hurricane ripped through the east side of the valley.
So, as I considered what I was thankful for this week, the fact that we escaped relatively unscathed was on top of my list. Yeah, it’s a mess, but it could be worse. Now we’ve bought a chainsaw, and over the next days and weeks we’re going to attack the fallen trees and clear them. On the bright side, we should have enough firewood to last a long, long time.
There’s these two old guys in my ward who claim I’m the spitting image of “Buddy Holly”, and I can’t look things up on Google. So a picture of him would be fun, because I’m “Buddy Holly reincarnated for the Lord.”
Since he doesn’t know who Buddy Holly is, or looks like, I figured I’d do some quick photo work. Here’s a classy old photo of Buddy:
As Zaque continues serving his mission, he has opportunities every Monday to write emails to people (which I forward on to a larger group), and if he’d like, he can use Google Hangouts to chat with his family. For the past two weeks, he’s attempted to chat with me, but both times Pepper and I were in the middle of something– once in town, and once at a friend’s house– so we couldn’t engage. Last week he chatted with Kyra, and this was one thing he wrote to her:
HEY I GOT A STORY
So basically I came home and decided I wanted grilled cheese. Like realllllllllly wanted grilled cheese. So I made 3 grilled cheeses and drank a big glass of milk. So I’m just like, “Shoot, I won’t be able to poop for a week!” So then I just start eating a bunch of Hot Cheetos, hoping that they will, through black magic, somehow cancel each other out and I can poop regularly.
Not gonna lie. My poopin’s been good.
So I guess it worked. It’s all about the miracles of God.
It’s not often I get annoyed by a box of graham crackers.
But seriously, when I open a new box and find that the top inch of the box is empty space, and there’s around half an inch of gap on the sides as well, it’s annoying. They could easily have fit another 2-3 crackers horizontally, and just shortened the box to the height of the bags inside it. What’s with all the tomfoolery here?
Pepper and I headed up to Flathead Brewing Co, which is a local brewpub that hosts a trivia night every Wednesday evening. We knew the food was good (we’ve been there before) and we were looking for something social.
When we walked in, we met a small group of friends who invited us to join their team. Although we did horribly (the categories were things like “presidential nicknames” and “birthstones”), we had a good time chatting with our new friends. We stayed well after the game was over, talking about the area, our lives, our kids, and so on. It was a ton of fun.
At the close of the evening we bid farewell to Ashley, Cheryl, and Adam… hopefully we’ll go back some future Wednesday and team up with them again!
So of course I pulled out a piece of scratch paper and did some math. I sent the answer back, and we agreed it was right (he doesn’t actually know the correct answer, so he had done the math as well).
Then Pepper walked into the room and asked why I was doing math on a piece of scratch paper. I showed her the text. She just shook her head and said, “You guys are such nerds.”
All along Highway 35, people have fake road signs posted by their driveways. I think it’s mainly because on the east side, driveways simply meander up into the forest without any clear markings, making it difficult to find houses as you’re flying past at 50mph. Our postman, George, told us that many years ago, the Postal Service allowed some of the people to change their fake streets into real “addressable” roads. For example, our friends the Zavalas were able to create Zavala Lane, and you can find it on Google Maps and write a letter to that address.
Although we can’t have an official USPS street in our name, we needed a way to help people find our house. After deciding against the Easter Island head idea, we opted for a fake road sign. Today we put it up!
Now we won’t have to navigate using the red van (which is no longer there) or even the mailbox with a lawnmower. We can just tell people to turn into Cosmo and Pepper’s Place. Boom.
