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Spring’s officially been here a while, so we started thinking about firewood for next winter. We now have an agreement with a lady to clean up her property’s woods in exchange for the firewood we can scrounge, which should work out pretty good as soon as the ground firms up a bit.

I jumped the gun and decided to go out there early and grab a load or two, and as soon as we stepped out of the Suburban we knew we’d be in trouble if she set foot on the grass. I love my ‘burban to death, but it’s only a 2wd vehicle and despite having a working posi in the rear-end, it’s still like a labrador on linoleum if it loses traction.

So we decided to play it safe and leave the Suburban and the trailer on the gravel… at least that was the plan. The trailer we’re using is some dumbass short thing – the wheelbase between the wheels and the rear wheels of the towing vehicle is ridiculously short. If you take your eyes off it for a second you’re jack-knifed and have to try again – so I did my best not to take my eyes off it.

Naturally, that meant spending far too long with my eyes off the gravel – long enough at least to drop two wheels off it and onto the very, very soft grass which very quickly turned into a muddy soup with the around 4,000 ft/lbs of torque I think the ‘burban can deliver to the wheels.

We looked around for things we could use, but there wasn’t much that was any good… the house on the property was all locked up, there was a couple steel buildings but all were pretty well empty. We scrounged up a pressure treated 4×4, but couldn’t really get it into a position to make any use of it – one side of the vehicle was sitting on it’s guts.

We tried every traction aiding trick in the book to no avail – I finally gave up and called my wife to pick us up. We ended up having a neighbour with a 4×4 pull it out – it didn’t need much help to get out, just enough to get the front tire out and then it came out under it’s own power… but it needed help after all. We grabbed what wood we can, and brought it home, to wait for the ground to firm up before trying again.

I do have a great plan to build the ‘burban out into a 4wd, and I spend probably a couple hours a week doing research to that end – however I lack the funds to buy the 4×4 running gear I’d want to do the swap, and I don’t want to wimp out and use a 10-bolt front diff when everything else is built so heavy.

You really couldn’t complain about the weather here today, considering we were supposed to have a horrendous “winter storm” that’s supposed to last two days. It was in the 20s, but it felt great outside.

I went out to split a few pieces of the thicker wood, because it burns better for longer periods than the thinner logs… and they were all covered in snow. I lost the wedges in the snow a couple of times, and my shoes are wet.

I shoveled the path to the driveway, against my better judgment, because traipsing through the snow left my shoes wet. I was going to shovel the driveway, but we only had about 6″ of snow on the ground, and the only person leaving was my brother in law who has a4WD anyway… I bet we’ll get more snow tonight so I’ll just shovel it tomorrow.

The roads are slick, and as usual there’s the usual batch of idiots who despite having lived here their entire lives, don’t have a damn clue how to drive. They speed down the street, full acceleration – you know their speedo is reporting about 5mph faster than their car is actually travelling.

They speed down the street, effectively panic-braking at the stop sign, only to skate straight through it. Oh well, no harm no foul, no one else was at the intersection so what could go wrong?

There’s the usual tell-tale skidmarks on the ice… weird fish shapes, ellipticals, ovals, dogs-legs, all the kinds of markings to show that folks probably aren’t driving as slow as they probably should in these conditions.

In fact now that I think about it, it’s not the snow that I hate – it’s the way people act in it.

Well I guess realistically it’s not that hot (I have a friend who’s out near Baghdad at the moment, and it’s 121F where he’s stationed at), but I just keep picking stupid things to do.

Hey let’s go running!

Hey let’s go work on an exhaust for the Oldsmobile! Awesome!

In the winter I don’t like having retractable testicles so I try and stretch out as far as possible between showers, but in the summer… wooh. Our bathroom faucets are getting a workout because I know I’m not the only one taking more than one shower a day sometimes.

So my wife found this Earth Hour thing where tonight at 8:30pm (your local time zone) you turn off as many lights as you can, presumably as an exercize in doing without so we can hopefully learn to be a less wasteful society.

I admit it, I don’t do everything I can, despite the fact I’m a bit of an environmentalist at heart. I like the ideas of things like sustainable hunting, sustainable farming, I love animals (to just short of the point of not eating them) and when I remember to I turn off lights that aren’t necessary.

However I also drive a tank of a vehicle (though admittedly we don’t drive it that much), and I frequently leave lights on that should be off just because I don’t think. For convenience’s sake, I don’t use many power-saving features on my computer – I turn my monitor off when I leave my desk purely for the reason that the lamps inside an LCD have a finite lifespan, of which my LCD has exceeded by double.

So this earth hour I think I’m going to take a more proactive approach – I can help save the environment and practice my target shooting with my BB pistol.

Just kidding. I’ll probably turn out some lights though.

The first few warm days of the season are great. It’s nice to just chill out in the sun and think about all the things that bothered you all winter. “When are we going to get this asbestos off the side of our house?” or at least when are we going to get rid of the nasty “Carolina Denim” paint job.

“Will the Suburban in the driveway ever roll again?” I’m pretty sure I’ll get it moving again, I just need the motivation to get out and do it. At the moment we’re enjoying the sunshine and hoofing it everywhere, or riding bikes. Spring is great for things like these, and I’m sure walking or riding a half mile a day isn’t killing me in the slightest.

“where can I find affordable auto insurance“… No, just kidding I rarely sit and ponder something so silly. I am reminded that it’s coming up again, but there’s not much you can do to avoid that.

Later that day I started talking to a friend about Iguana, which led me to go through a bunch of our old pictures of old pets. For those who don’t know, at one point we had around 50 rats, all of whom were just as cute as the other.  We also had two iguana, one of whom grew to about 4′ in length as well as an assortment of hamsters, fish, etc.

Of course remembering the fact they’re no longer with us totally ruins the feeling of sitting in the sun in the morning for the first time of the season, but that’s okay.

The worst of the weather’s behind us, but I’m still feeling the effects – I’ve had this damn flu for quite some time now, and while it doesn’t really bother me when I’m at the computer, anything even remotely physical turns into an achey affair.

Today’s actually quite nice out, and even nicer in – the fire is finally working correctly and I installed a vent in the floor of our bedroom to allow the heat to filter up without opening the bedroom door (which leads to all kinds of canine lawlessness). We got another load of wood yesterday, and the rate we’re going we hopefully shouldn’t need more until the weekend.

But man, thursday and friday were absolutely terrible. The Suburban wouldn’t start at all and for some reason the extra battery didn’t charge correctly so I had to skip Karate. We burned a crazy amount of wood and everyone was still cold, and my lips are cracked and bleeding from the “arctic” air.

Thankfully though, nothing in the way of plumbing froze (discounting the washing machine, but it always freezes in the winter) and we didn’t run out of wood, and I’m hopeful that we’ve seen the last of that kind of weather for a while. It’s really cemented in my mind that there’s quite a few things that need done on the exterior of the house that I absolutely have to get to this summer – and not put off again for another year.

Picture related, it’s from the ice storm a couple weeks back – I mainly wrote this post to test the Flickr manager plugin.