Firewood got the best of me

Tonight we are getting snow again, supposed to be 15" before it is over.

That's OK, the critters are all fed, and I'm working inside. Today's project is to wire the phones in to the new office. In between that, I was ordered by Wendy to get a few days worth of firewood. I like free firewood, it usually comes in the form of pallets. I could digress and talk all about the stuff we have built using free pallets around here, but I won't.

So my mission was to go outside next to the pile of empty musket crates and drag in some pallets to cut up using my table saw. First I drag them into the garage bay where my saw is. In doing so, I managed to trip and catch my kneecap on the edge of a pallet, the spot that would be your funnybone if it were your elbow...no really funny at all.

The first step in making firewood out of pallets is to cut the stringers up into three sections using a sawzall. The sawzall was sitting on a crate, and when I bent over to pick up the end of the extention cord to plug it in, I managed to nail myself in the forehead, right at the scalp line with the tip of the saw blade. Pallets 2, Pete 0

After the pallets are cut into sections, I lift them up onto my table saw to slice the stringer sections away from the planking. To do this, you need to remove the chip-shield and anti-kick device...see where I'm going with this? Witihn minutes, I had chips in both eyes and got whacked in the groin with a piece of the planking that got kicked back at me. Pallets 5, Pete 0

In the end, the wood is all stacked up in the garage, ready to be stuffed into paper feed bags for transport upstairs to the house and dumped into the woodbin. Even though I'm down 5-0 at the moment, I'll win tonight as the dry oak wood from the dismembered pallets heat me house.

So far this winter, our heating bill here is something like a third of what it would have been at our drafty old Victorian house in Massachusetts. Modern insulation, double-pane windows, a southern exposure with lots of glass and auxilliary wood heat go a long way towards saving on the energy bill.

We are always looking for little ways to cut back on the utilities. Last month, our light bill was down by $40, mostly from switching to the energy efficient flourescent light bulbs that screw into a regular incandesent socket (the kind that are corkscrew shaped). Little stuff like turning off the computer monitor and printer when not in use helps out too. With the land we are clearing, we expect to have a lot of firewood stacked up by next winter, which will basically be free heat.

Sure, you get whacked in the groin by the table saw now and again, but it beats getting kicked in the groin by the gas company in Massachusetts every winter when the bill is sometimes upwards of a grand a month!