Debarking and Logs for that House.

Today we debarked. And I learned a thing or two. I'm sure you all remember my adventure with the stomach flu, and me throwing my back out. Well, now I understand why those things happened. I hit upon a piece of good luck so singular it is hardly to be believed. Because it turns out that if you fell trees the best time to debark them is in the spring. Which means that you are not using the draw knife and weeping into your hands because the bark is glued to the tree and you haven't made any real progress even thought it's been like, a fucking hour.

Instead we had the bark come off in great slippery chunks and all we had to do was loosen it up and pull. Which meant that I spent some time yelling about how we were freaking debarking wizards and then I accidentally threw my own shoe at the logs.

Possibly in a misguided attempt to high five them. With my foot.

Although in my rush to explain to you, gentle readers, about the good news, I forgot to start at the beginning. And the beginning was getting the house logs, the biggest motherfucking huge ten foot long and a foot thick motherfuckers that were still in the forest.

In the rock bar.

So optimistically we drove Sue, our pickup truck down in the back and loaded him up with the first two logs.* The first two logs that were notably smaller. However the last two were demons made of heavy from the heaviest part of hell. We tried pushing them through the rock bar. We tried pulling them. We tried taking the ratchet strap off of the ratchet and using that to pull the logs. Which is when I learned a valuable lesson called when you are failing to drag logs out of the woods, wrap the strap around your non-dominate hand.

Trust me on that one.

So after about, oh twenty minutes of failing so hard I am sure they could hear it a few states away, we decided to get King, the backhoe. Of course this was no easy task as we had to shove and push our way through all the tree dead fall to get down into the back acres. See when super storm Sandy showed up and bitch slapped us around a good number of trees lost there tops. But I don't mean lost as in, they fell off, no I mean lost as in they mostly came off but then they didn't fall because there was just enough to hold them onto the tree. Basically it looks like the tree is trying to be a gentle man and take it's hat off for a lady, only instead of a hat it's just holding out it's top branches.

Right in the way of the backhoe.

Of course Scott was all do you want to ride in the backhoe and I'm all like, hell yeah I do. So I wedged myself in there and we got in a few boxing matches with trees and then we drug the logs out of the forest like it was goddamned nothing. Then we had to roll them close to the front bucket and play some sort of fucked up cats cradle to keep them there. Of course the whole thing was stupidly easy compared to the lets-destroy-our-spines-forever method.

Then we returned triumphantly back to the farm yard and dropped them into our backyard where we had laid out a storage/debarking area.

And the rest, as you know, is history.

Awesome history.

*Sue is a boy. We named him after Johnny Cash's song, A Boy Named Sue. Because this is the fucking country.