Too Much Nature And Outdoor Living
Happy Fourth Of July! Happy Independence Day!

So Dewey was up flying air recon. The timber harvest is about 75% done and it is still interesting to watch them work. Here they parked the feller buncher while getting some of the harvested logs onto a truck and headed off to market. Good crew. They work very fast and under very strict environmental regulation, but I believe that feller buncher operator thinks he is driving an  M1 Abrams.

I asked the FB operator if he could remove two seriously dying tall pines located close to the house. Each by drone altimeter measurement 95+ feet above ground elevation and by yardstick 32″ in diameter. The equipment operators will not go near a driveway, so he drove up a 30% grade from the processing landing site, vaulted over a stone wall, and snatched each tree after cutting it off at ground level. Then, like a giant Transformer, he hauled each vertically oriented back down the slope. That machine is ferocious. I tried to pay him for a half hour at the controls, but…

Logging some drone hours

Every couple of days I put Dewey up over the site and track where they have cut, to what degree and what the progress has been to plan. The feller buncher is now well ahead of the processor that will limb the logs and cut them to optimal length. The site should be clear of harvested timber by the end of next week with entrance to the property then blocked with Maine granite slabs and boulders.

We are struggling to get this inset video set up correctly. The 4K video is clear and sharp when viewed full screen or downloaded and displayed on a player, but fuzzy and loaded with noise when viewed on the integrated web page player. So I am guessing it is the Apache web server, WordPress handling of video, or the scaling algorithm in the page player that is creating lots of noise. Yes, of course I have no clue.  I tried dropping from 4k to 1920 x 1080 which greatly reduced file size, eliminated buffering when viewing, but was as good as 4K in full screen and as bad as 4K when scaled to the page.

This video was scaled to 1920 x 1080 and 30 fps. Last check, there is a list of drone camera settings I need to try and hopefully get a better result. In the mean time. I am learning more about piloting the drone, particularly flying trails through the woodland at ten feet versus safely flying over at 200 feet and fighting gusting winds aloft.

An old man’s life…

Two incidences occurred on back to back days. The first was a chainsaw mambo that left me superficially impaled on cut saplings with my free fall broken when my head struck a large tree stump. A thirty foot tall tree, growing out of the side of a fifty foot tree, was loaded with long and heavily leaved branches that obstructed sunlight to the garden and needed to be removed.

The Husqvarna easily cut through the smaller tree’s trunk at the union to the larger tree, but its upper limbs remained entwined with the larger tree. So with chainsaw in my left hand at idle, I pushed the trunk of the cut tree forward expecting it to put up a fight. It did not. Now off balance and falling forward, I jettisoned the chainsaw some distance away so it would not greet me on the ground, and resigned myself to whatever nature had in store for me in free fall.

With the dead cat-like reflexes of an old man, I could think ahead as the event unfolded, but was powerless to alter the course of gravity. My head hit the stump first, leaving me with a buzzing sensation, but my body motion continued on until my forearms hit sharply pointed cut saplings which then brought me to a full stop. I remember thinking while in transit, “Oh shit! This is going to hurt” and I was not disappointed.

For those of you who are familiar with blood thinners, you know how this works. You get cut, you briefly bleed like the blood spurting Black Knight in a in Monty Python movie, and then the bleeding abruptly stops. Unfortunately, that dwell time between cut and stop lasted through a wobbly odyssey from yard to kitchen sink and a bit beyond. The blood trail was freely made and not  at all hard to follow.

I don’t get rattled in a crisis, which comes from spending years as a parent and dealing with emergencies, or being on nuclear alert with B-52s… or growing up in New Jersey. Who knows? In any event, my first thoughts were not about how to stop the bleeding, I knew how to do that, but rather how to bleed on the tile and hardwood and not on the wool carpet.

So I made it to the first aid station, AKA a downstairs’ bathroom, took a hydrogen peroxide bath, painted with Betadine and covered with band aids, bandages, gauze, and stretchy tape. I wish I had a video of that process, attempting to coordinate hand to chin, to underarm while applying blow out patches. Then into the shower and out to repeat all of the first aid steps ending with The Mummy cosplay wrapped bandages.

Then Sparky bit me…

A day after the clinging tree incident, I was looking for a 3 lb mini sledge that was in my garage bound small landscape trailer, along with some clearing powered equipment and stakes for some recently transplanted rose bushes. Unfortunately, the trailer was sandwiched between motorcycles and lawnmower on one side and a compact John Deere tractor that goes by the name of Sparky. I could see the hammer in the trailer, approximately 7 feet from where I stood.

I thought I could side slip between motorcycles, step over the lawn mower, twist 45 degrees to maximize my reach and grab the hammer. All was proceeding well, up to the lawn mower step over, when the oversized tongue on my sneakers got garrotted by the lawnmower’s extended recoil starter cord and momentum became my very fast and very worst enemy. Once again, my head came to my fall breaking rescue when it struck  the tractor’s right loader arm and the rest of me seemed to just accordion behind. Sneaker still trapped on the recoil starter cord, head pancaked on the loader arm, and nothing to hold up everything in between. So it all fell to the cement floor with only my left knee to mark the end of my journey.

The fall definitely rang my bell so to speak. I felt something cool and wet running down my forehead and cheek. Of course I knew what it was, but that did not stop me from pulling my hand away from my face and into view so I could fully perceive the then current situation. Owie-owie! Back to the first aid station, more bandages on head and leg, a couple of butterflies to close up my forehead and I was good as new. Just a little more black and blue with a tinge of orange and a visual horizon that was not always parallel to ground.

The moral to this story? Sure. Why not?

I took a week off of outside projects and heavy work. There was an awakening in all of that. I spent 54 years with my wife. She was always around when I was working and she always kept an eye on me. There was never a trip to the emergency room when she wasn’t at the wheel of the vehicle getting us there post haste. More so, she always had a cautionary tale that keep me from attempting a daredevil approach to home repair and maintenance.

I am not without good friends or family, but I do spend a good deal of time on my own. If things had unfolded a bit more severely I’m not sure what would have happened. Take away? Don’t attempt things beyond my reach, physical or otherwise.

In closing, Happy Fourth of July! I love this country passionately. I love its beauty and grandeur, its heritage and history. I am amazed by all that has been accomplished over the past two hundred and fifty years. I will forever be grateful for the safe home it has afforded me and my family all of our lives. I will forever be grateful of those who came before us and did the heavy lifting to give all Americans so many great opportunities. God bless America!