More uselessness of note...

My sleep pattern is completely wrecked.

Some guy named Mark took some pictures at Bryan Park on Tuesday. You can see them here...

I learned some useful information about firewood today. My father in law came up to help us move 200 gallons of heating oil from southside to our house. I was supposed to but a broken clavicle got me out of that bit of hard work. I do feel bad about this but at the same time I did not have to spend the better part of today sweating my ass off so I'm going to chalk this one up in the "win" column. So he came up with two missions. One to move some fuel and the other to give us some much need schooling on splitting wood. A few weeks ago I was working on some smaller pieces with a maul or "poppper" The technique was not the best but I did make some progress. However it did seem that I was not making progress at a very swift rate. Apparently it's quite a bit easier to split wood when it is in the from of a billet.
When a tree is chopped down for wood the large parts of the trunk are cut into cross-sections that of various thicknesses. We have several from a large dead oak that was cut down in the lot next door. Each one was over 24" across and at least 14" tall. They all weigh over 100lbs too. So Howdy gave us some advice and a demo on how to split wood with a sledge hammer and a wedge. Turns out its actually pretty easy to make short work of a large billet of wood with the right tools.

Sarah has been really pushing to learn more practical skills like this and hopefully we will actually get to make use of them. If we end up getting a wood stove this can easily save us $2000 on our heating bill this winter.

Oh and as an epilogue to my earlier post about the oil moving scheme the end result was this. We ended up getting just short of 180 gallons of heating oil.
Cost of oil $100
Cost of pump $50
Cost of two 55gallon drums $50
Cost of gas to get to southside and back a few times $10

Total cost of project: $250
Cost of 180 gallons of oil at projected fall rate of $4.65 per gallon: $837
Total money saved: $587

Sweet!