The non-stop thrills of the urban lifestyle
Our tiny little backyard runs up against a drystone wall that separates our palatial estate (all 50x100 feet of it) from a parking lot and a acupuncture clinic. At the top of the wall, there is about 3 feet of pretty-much abandoned land before you run into the cheapo plywood wall of the acupuncture center. Since this is the Willamette valley, it rains a lot, and so that 3 feet has things growing in it, ranging from the usual crop of native vines through the usual crop of English Ivy (if not for the himalayan blackberries, it would be the kudzu of the northwest) to the occasional tree. Or trees. We've got a bunch of trees growing up there, ranging from a Persian Walnut that is slowly pushing the drystone wall into our back we-call-it-a-garden to a holly tree to a bunch of scraggly evergreens to a shrub elm which is helping the walnut tree bring down the wall.
The walnut tree is conveniently twined around the telephone wires, so if I cut it down it will cut off all phone service to southeast Portland, but the elm tree isn't. Or wasn't. I've been looking at a bunch of Stickley houseplans, and as part of his harping on the sort of suburban lifestyle that has almost singlehandedled created global warming he points out that you can use natual logs to make rustic porches, furniture, and whatnot. To use natural logs for this, you need to have wood that doesn't grow bent, and, conveniently enough (for me, if not for the scrub elm), elm trees love to grow in nice straight lines.
So, instead of staying inside and reading about Canadian politics (it's now D-day to see if the Tories and the BQ can get together to dissolve Canada into a bunch of squabbling and very tasty to the imperialist superpower to the south city-states), I spent the afternoon sawing down the elm bush, then trimming the downed limbs into logs suitable for building houses and withes suitable for weaving into rustic furniture. After all, there's not anything I can do about the latest Canadian experiment with self-immolation, no matter how much I'd like to be there and voting with extreme prejudice against Harper and the rest of his GOP-loving ilk, but I can slow down the inevitable tree-caused collapse of the waterlogged back wall.
And now I've got about 120 linear feet of elm logs, in sizes ranging from 6" diameter down to 2", and about 50 feet of withes, both waiting for me to go out and strip the bark off them so they can be used for house/furniture parts.
(And to unwind, I washed about 400 Legos that we found at SCRAP yesterday. One of these decades some of those pieces may become a computer case, but before I do that I have to pry them out of the hands of the bears, which, if my experience is any indication, will happen when I'm about 120 years old.)