This coming winter is already taken care of, so now I am working on winters 2023, 2024, 2025, etc. This week I have done nothing but retrieve a small portion of the windfall over the past year, yielding a heaping pickup every day. Thus far my mountain of firewood to be split and stacked is about 1-1/2 winters, maybe more if the new cabin windows make the same difference as did the two previous projects — insulating and sealing the crawl space under the cabin, and replacing all the chinking between the logs. These two ventures resulted in cutting our firwood needs by almost 50% last winter.
The road up to the previously felled timber is blocked by windfall trees which must be cut up and removed to even get to the upper inventory. Each of these trees renders almost a full pickup load of cut bolts.
I haven’t even made it to this tree yet, with its 40+-feet of clear trunk almost 24″ in diameter. If it were less logistically challenging, I would contemplate getting this one milled into slabs.
I’ve retrieved four truckloads, with at least another dozen still awaiting my ministrations.
This maple log was a particular challenge as I had to use some block-and-tackle to enable my little pickup to drag it uphill and on to the road so I could work it. This made me appreciate my little Stihl saw all the more. It is small and lightweight but can handle an 18-inch bar due to its narrow chain. I keep the chain sharpened several times a day and have to swap out the current chain because I’ve worn it to the nub.
This week also brought the first swatches of color to the local flora.
Some months ago I was approached by my friend TimD, who was organizing a “Historic trades” weekend at his place with fellow gunsmiths, horn workers, blacksmiths, weavers, etc. Tim is an accomplished craftsman, primarily making flintlock rifles and associated accessories like powder horns. So, he was gathering a number of friends and acquaintances for a weekend shindig open to the public and he asked me to demonstrate making my Tordonshell to the crowds. It was a peculiar technology to include but I was delighted to participate. I spent three days on display and explained Tordonshell to literally hundreds of attendees.
I was set up to occupy Tim’s gunsmith shop, a reconstructed late 18th/early19th log structure, using the partner’s workbench I built for him a few years ago.
The front porch of the shop was occupied by other artisans including a wool spinner and my very own polissoir-maker Gary.
I was frankly surprised by both the number of visitors I had, and the intensity of their interest in both genuine tortoiseshell and my imitation of it.
Next year’s event is already on the books for Labor Day weekend and is expected to have around 30 demonstrators. I am already at work for my demonstrations, as I will be making things out of finished Tordonshell as opposed to making the Tordonshell itself.
It’s that time of year when there’s a run-up to firewood season. I will soon find myself building a mountain of cut firwood next to the splitter and spending several days splitting and stacking the finished product to season and await its use. We do not need any firewood for the coming winter, and perhaps even into the start of next winter, but my goal is to get ahead of the heating fuel curve by three winters.
In addition to that we’ve had some work done on the homestead (more on that later) that is prompting some aggressive brush cleanup around the log barn near where my pal Bob felled some trees eighteen months ago. To that end I’ve spent the past two weeks working in the area extracting brush, cutting wood, and bush hogging.
A simple tool I made from, once again, wood from the scrap inventory and decking screws, has been exceedingly helpful; a saw buck. It was made from pressure treated pieces left over from some long-forgotten project, took very little time or energy to become manifest. In sort, a perfect “mundanity.”
Exploiting the properties of triangles and diagonal bracing the saw buck is very light — I can move and maneuver it easily with one hand while the other is holding the idling chain saw — and also exceeding strong with a holding capacity of several hundred pounds. Thus I can easily get the piece(s) to be sawn up off the ground so that I don’t have to finesse the saw bar to keep it from touching the ground. Around here if the running chain hits the ground, it hits a rock, and off to sharpening it goes.
I recently ordered a new pair of lightweight logging boots to replace my old ones, now 20 years old and very high mileage (not to mention they weigh seven pounds apiece). Somewhere in my search I came across this fascinating video of handmade boots.
Our little corner of paradise has many idyllic features fitting my “Want List,” compiled over 30 years, almost perfectly. Remote? Check (as the realtors have advertised, we are three mountains back from the nuclear blast zones). Sparse population? Check (reputedly the lowest population of any county east of the Mississippi River). Isolation? Check (nearest permanent neighbors a mile away). Geographic beauty? Oh yeah.
Rich, loamy soil perfect for gardening? Uh, not so much. I actually think that the primary “agricultural” product of our region is not cattle and sheep but rocks. Even now after a dozen years of gardening the same spot Mrs. Barn gathers a new pile of rocks every Spring during her pre-planting preparations. By the way, this has to be done by hand as the “soil” will beat the ever lovin’ snot out of a garden tiller. I once rented a trencher to bury some electrical conduit. Didn’t last five minutes.
Recognizing the nature of the “soil” here I built a series of raised beds for gardening before we moved here. I ordered a truck load of “topsoil” that had to be screened to remove all the gravel, then filled the boxes with that screened dirt. Soon enough there were green shoots popping up.
Early on I affixed PVC hoops ribs on the boxes so they could be netted in the summer and covered with plastic in the winter. On two of the boxes I built removable screened hoop covers for the beds, and this past winter I was informed that the two screened covers were plumb wore out and needed to be replaced.
Given the importance of the enclosed raised beds I decided to make some first-class hoop covers for them. I began by taking the time to make a form on which I could assemble laminated curved ribs. Then the work got serious.
Perhaps I should call this series, “Fun with scrap wood” as many of the projects are derived from the piles of leftover wood laying around the barn. Such is the case with this one.
Using pressure treated southern yellow pine and some cypress boards I fashioned this movable/removable shower seat for the bath tub. I hand planed all the boards before assembling them with decking screws. The seat slats are cut to fit between the bathtub walls and screwed to underlying battens, and top end elements perpendicular to them to rest on top of the tub walls.
I planed chamfers on the tops of all the seat slats, thinking it would eliminate any discomfort while sitting and taking a shower. That has not worked out so well as the corners still press hard against flesh; I may go back in and round the upper chamfer corners.
Otherwise, the bench works perfectly. I will keep an eye on the top piece to see if cracks appear along the screw line. If so I will have to retool it. But for now, when I need it I can grab if from the space behind the hamper, and when finished I put it back.
Labor Day weekend will be the inaugural 18th Century Craft shindig here in Highland County, where I have been asked to demonstrate tortoiseshell craft. Events | Fair Lawn Farm (visitfairlawnfarm.com
Since tortoiseshell is a restricted material I will be focusing my efforts on the making and working of tordonshell, a convincing substitute I invented many years ago so that I could make Boullework, starting with a pot of hot hide glue and a few select additives. At the time I was contemplating patenting the formula, but then I con$ulted with a patent attorney and found out how much it would co$t to go through with it. Phooey on that, I just published the paper and moved on. (The estimate wa$ for a completed application and patent to co$t $25-50k.)
Along the way I made a lot of tordonshell things to make sure it mimicked tortoiseshell accurately, which will be of great interest to the powder horn crowd.
For the rest of this week and into next week I will be gathering the materials and rehearsing the demonstrations, beginning with discussions of the materials themselves and the making of tordonshell so that all the attendees can go home and make it themselves to use in their own craft work. It will also be a dry run for my next video project which I hope to begin filming this winter. I keep telling myself I cannot start a new one until I get the Gragg Chair video edited and posted on line.
As I gently ease myself back into the routine of life on the homestead, especially a life of work in the barn studio (I find that each day adds another few minutes to my naturally recovering stamina), my first few projects are ones that do not require any special level of precision or strength.
Those first few outings to the barn were spent at mundane tasks like tidying up the workshop and organizing my product inventory. I hope this makes it easier to be prompt in my fulfillment, even though I will still probably only mail things out once or twice a week.
What was most important about these tasks is that I could accomplish them while sitting down.
A second undertaking revolved around the fact that my entryway “steps” to the barn had been, for the past fifteen years, two hunks of southern yellow pine 8x8s left over from the original frame raising in November 2007. Could it really be almost fifteen years? In recent time the timbers had become aged and their corners rounded, making them unsteady underfoot.
Using some pressure treated lumber from the inventory I fashioned a new platform, one much steadier when I step up and into the barn. Nothing fancy, just pure crude utility. I will probably appreciate that even more when this coming week I attempt to hoof it up the hill rather than taking my little truck given that my legs are only now gaining adequate strength and muscle mass. I’ll take it slow, probably 4-5 minutes to ambulate the almost 200 yards, and hope my legs don’t turn to jelly before I get there. It’s quite amazing how much muscle tone I lost with nearly a month of inactivity.
This will almost certainly be my final comment on my recent bout with the engineered bioweapon. My previous post evoked enough response, mostly privately, that I just wanted to wrap everything up, and unless there is some dramatic change in the recovery trajectory this should suffice.
In the final 48 hours of hospitalization when it became clear that my release was coming down the pike and my full recovery was simply a matter of time, one message from the nurses, respiratory therapists, doctors and even pharmacists was clearly presented with great emphasis and zero ambiguity. To whit, “You cannot ‘power your way through this.’ Recovery will take its own path and you cannot speed it up even if it is your tendency to try. Resist the temptation to work harder because that route is the path of relapse.”
We took them seriously and it was a large part of our decision to stay an extra week at a local motel to rest before flying home. It was the smart thing to do and worked exactly as the hospitalians had exhorted me.
Last week at The Fortress of Solitude I spent a good bit of time simply resting, napping every morning and afternoon for 15-20 minutes, punctuated by gentle activity including a few hours per day in the shop. Even then rather than walking up the hill, my commute is normally a 150-yard stroll up a 15% incline, I drove to the barn and spent virtually all of my time there sitting. You can do a lot of cleaning and organizing while sitting down. I made no attempt to do anything remotely resembling productive work, although I did get out to run errands in town every day. Just to do something different.
I can honestly say that my strict adherence to the post-hospitalization instructions have resulted in me feeling better every day. Literally. Every day. Yes, my legs are sorta tired as you would expect from almost a month’s inactivity, but even their muscle soreness gives me delight.
On Thursday I saw my local doctor, whom I like and trust a great deal. He is temperamentally an old soul; when he comes in to examine a patient he sits down and begins a conversation that will last as long as it needs to be for him to come to a solid understanding of the issue. He even writes down his observations by hand and pen on a legal pad! None of this breezing in and out for a few seconds and punching a few places of a compewder tablet. He spent a good long time with me as I recounted the whole harrowing tale and he checked me out completely. After listening to my heart and lungs, he said, “This is remarkable. If I did not know already that you have been sick I would not know that you had been sick. Everything sounds clear as a bell!” He reiterated the warnings about over exertion, reminding me that my recovery to full strength and stamina is nearly a 100% likelihood but also the timetable for that is 10-12 weeks.
I go back in a month for some follow-up testing that is not possible until the pharmacological cocktail coursing through my veins gets purged (I took my very last pill with breakfast this morning).
At this point the only peculiarity is my sleep pattern. I have suffered from sleep dysfunction (insomnia) for over 50 years and am currently on a curve that is unfamiliar to me. Beginning in the motel after release from the hospital I began incorporating melatonin into my night time routine, and the effect has been remarkable. For the past two weeks I have been falling asleep easily and promptly, but thanks to the now-completed course of steroids I’d been waking around 3AM. Last night I fell asleep around 10.30 and slept through the night until 4.56AM. With steroids now in the rearview mirror I am hoping that I regain a more congenial sleep pattern.
NB – I have no intention to turn this post into a rant, but I will be expressing some observations rather pointedly, observations I believe are borne out by the public record. Regardless, this will be one of the most personal postings I’ve ever made here, so if that is of no interest to you I am fine with that.
Finally, it is worth noting that I ascribe to the Mollie Hemingway aphorism, “My spiritual gift is that I do not care what you think about anything.”
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Those faithful 300 readers of this blog have assuredly noticed my long absences from these pages over the past 5+ months, and I wanted to give you a bit of the back story on that.
Our timeline trajectory was in great part established by the birth of our new grandson, Li’l T, in early March. The trauma surrounding that blessing was one which lingered for a long time. He was in deep distress and retrieved from the womb by emergency surgery, emerging limp, blue, the umbilicus wrapped around his throat five times, and his respiratory system fully engorged with bodily waste. Th neonatal specialists in Labor and Delivery had a couple dozen seconds to bring him to life, which they did. Li’l T proceeded to spend ten days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit while Mrs. Barn and I did what we could to support, encourage, and assist his mom and dad with excellent home cooking (her) and projects around the house (me).
Since coming home Li’l T has made steady progress, even beginning to flourish. As near as anyone can tell he is a healthy, bright, developing little boy who is still on the small side but growing steadily.
In the five months since then we have been traveling and spending extended time with our family, doing whatever we could to help the little guy out. While there, I frankly had near-zero interest in the blog so my presence here was scarce.
Meanwhile I did shoehorn in a couple of SAPFM presentations, but other than preparing for them until this week I have spent only a few dozen hours in the shop since the beginning of March.
Once our routine settled with Li’l T came the unrelated news that Mrs. Barn’s sister’s husband was in the later stages of terminal pancreatic cancer, which eventually took his body in May. The logistics of the funeral arrangements in Kalifornistan were daunting, but right after the Fourth of July we winged our way west. The trip was to be a short whirlwind, I think 4-1/2 days in total. A couple days on the ground with all of Mrs. Barn’s siblings, the military interment one day, the worship celebration at church the next day, one more day for family time then a flight back home. The trip was expected to be so fast I did not even take my laptop, only my Kindle. It turned out to be a life saver.
The day we were scheduled to fly home I had a little sore throat and tested positive for the bioweapon plague. We rescheduled our flight and hunkered down in the hotel. In a little over 24 hours from that point I digressed from having a scratchy throat (never did have a sustained fever, severe headaches or the wracking cough) to being gravely ill in critical condition with bacterial pneumonia, hypoxia, dehydration, and disorientation so extreme I could not find the bathroom in the hotel room. Mrs. Barn and her sister got me to the ER ASAP the next morning, and I was admitted for what turned out to be almost two weeks.
I found out later that when I first arrived in the ER the plan was to intubate me as soon as I could get into a room. Fortunately, it took several hours to get me a room and by that time the antibiotics and high flow oxygen had revived me to the point where I was fully aware and engaged even if I did not feel particularly sparkly. What followed was 13 days of conscientious and competent care with a remarkably successful outcome.
In my last 48 hours in the hospital I was overhearing conversations between the nurses and doctors that over the past 30 months this hospital was concentrating on being a Front Line Covid Critical Care facility (they literally dedicated over half of the hospital to this undertaking) I was only THE SECOND PATIENT out of hundreds(?)/thousands(?) to make the recovery I did. From near-100% intubation candidate on Day 1 to being released on Day 13 with no external oxygen needs after Day 10. When the doctors and nurses asked me to what I attributed this recovery I replied simply, “In addition to your care I had an Army of Saints raising me up in prayer from coast-to-coast.” That is what I truly believe.
After release from the hospital we stayed at a nearby motel for six more days, “just to make sure.” The flight home was entirely uneventful, we arrived back in Shangri-La last Sunday afternoon. I have been slowly and carefully easing my way back into gentle activity including a few hours in the shop every day, mostly sitting and organizing and cleaning.
Since the beginning of this historical episode thirty months ago I have never doubted, not even for one moment, the risk that this engineered organism posed for some cohort of humanity, particularly for those with multiple co-morbidities, the worst of which were extreme age, compromised pulmonary systems, and obesity. Any of you who corresponded with me privately know this to be true. It has killed millions, disrupted and destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions, and destroyed ten$ of trillion$ of human flourishing due primarily to the unrestrained totalitarian impulses of political “leaders” and public health “experts.”
What I have doubted was virtually every “official” pronouncement regarding the nature, genesis, source, and response to covid. As time unfolds it becomes increasing clear to me that my doubts have been more than well-deserved as the posture of the “experts” rnged from outright deception and untruths, ass-covering, blame shifting, and leveraging benefits. As an informed, critical-thinking person I can only wonder about how differently the trajectory of this history might have been had Fauci obeyed the explicit directive from President Obama to discontinue gain-of-function research. Instead, using nefarious subterfuges Fauci outsourced the projects to the Chinese Communist Party Peoples’ Liberation Army bioweapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Who could’ve seen a problem with that?
I cannot say that before thirty months ago I ever wonder about the nature of a theoretical chimera formed by merging Josef Mengele and Josef Stalin. Now, I no longer have to wonder. Watching the “establishment” medical bureaucrats especially choose a path of explicitly discrediting, defaming, and destroying any honest scholars or even common citizens who disagreed with them, I’m thinking there should be a special residential wing underneath Leavenworth Prison.
So now you know a bit about my recent “lost” months.
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