wood, wood and wood

I am so tired of sticks and limbs and logs and wood in general!! We have spent nearly every nice weekend for the past couple months picking up limbs, cutting logs and stacking wood--none of it is immediately usable either! Wet wood is bad for the fireplace, so it has to dry out. However, we are fortunate to have a brush pile in the empty lot next to us that has lots of dry old wood in it. We cut from it this weekend and stocked up for some forecasted snow. Our weather man, Doug, says there's going to be accumulating snow this TH and more over Superbowl Sunday and even bigger snow the first week of Feb. Hope so.

I forgot to write last week that my dad hurt his finger a couple weeks ago. He was securing one of those boot scraper brush things to the ground and sliced his finger with a chisel. In the process, a piece of metal lodged itself under the skin and caused a small infection. An x-ray showed the piece deep in the skin and he had it removed this past TH. He is completely bandaged and somewhat out of commission. (That's not easy for him--he's always doing something) Dad has a wood stove outside that heats the house, etc. and his wood supply was low. He's not able to cut wood, so we brought up some of our ice storm wood. This was a surprise visit as Mom and dad were in Springfield for the day. As we got there, we saw HUGE tree chunks that needed to be split up to fit into dad's stove. Trevor helped Nathan run the splitter saying "Bombs away!" as he started splitting the logs. I stacked up the split logs and we all helped unload our truck. (Cody played on the swingset and in the sand box) :-) Dad now has a great big stack of wood and he too, should be set for any snows. We left some signs that we were there and waited Saturday night and Sunday morning for the phone call from gamma and poppy. It was such fun to do that for them and even more fun to do it as a surprise and wonder when they'd find it. We left a little tykes tractor Cody plays with at their house on the front porch and when we were inside to take a potty break before leaving, Cody got into gamma's stash of Buzz Lightyears. We found that out when dad called. They didn't discover the wood until Sunday after church! They started putting all the "toy" clues together and looked at the wood stack and realized we'd been there! That was fun! Good family time together helping others. We capped off a nice weekend with a walk last night! Oh, how nice to get out and walk!! We enjoyed the weather while we could.