man vs. shed, roommates and the internet

a few things from last week:

a few weeks ago, my roommates and i spoke about getting firewood for the winter (since we don't turn on the heat to save money, we just use the wood stove while we're home).

scratch that.

*I* brought up that we should start looking for firewood. maybe look on craigslist. maybe look around for something cheap. maybe look for something free, though not crappy wood. everyone agreed and cheered, "yay! free firewood!"

a few weeks went by. i looked on craigslist and found a few places giving away free firewood. some even very close to home. i emailed the guys, since i knew i'd be working late and they're great about checking their email, and said, "hey, can someone go check this out?" no one did.

after a couple weeks, i realized i was going to have to spearhead this effort if we were going to get wood. so i got on craigslist and started really looking for free firewood. emailed several people. got in touch with one. we arranged a pickup. this was on a tuesday. my roommates were conveniently not home that night when i left. i went over there with my station wagon and filled the backseat and trunk, about 1.5 layers thick - some doug fir and maybe hemlock. not much, but hey, it was free.

on the drive home, i HAPPENED to see a sign that said "free firewood!" just down the street from our house. i couldn't believe it! so close! i pulled over and picked though it. this time it was a rotten birch that someone had cut down, probably last year and just had sitting there. it was quite dry and in the proper size logs. some were very light; i left those. the trouble with this location was that the wood was located on the side of the house where the street is a steep hill with a stop sign. no place to pull over. so i had to walk each armful of logs back to my car, around the yard. by now it was dark so it might have looked a little weird with a woman walking around carrying logs from someone's house and putting them into her car. i probably took 5 armloads of semi-rotten wood and then drove home.

jason was home when i got back, and he happily helped me unload it into the backyard.

the next day i heard back from a guy who was selling around a cord of firewood for $90. cherry. been cut and seasoning all summer. probably the best we were going to get, and most of it was split. after talking with the man, i realized it was going to be a do-it-yourself operation, as he wasn't going to be able to help me. this night, again, no one was home when i went to go get the wood.

i drove over, assessed the pile, and started loading. i filled my car, to the brim, backseat all the way to the trunk, floor to ceiling, full of wood. i got home. the roommates were now home, and were glad to help out with the unloading of wood, though dinnertime was approaching and they were getting ready to eat dinner (where was my dinner?). this time, 3 of the 4 of them helped, with one not wanting to get dirty or something, i guess.

i asked if anyone wanted to come help me load up with a second load. "we're about to eat dinner," they replied, so i dutifully went back and loaded my car, again, filled to the brim. i got back, and again 3 people came out and helped me unload. we even used a wheelbarrow and zach led us in a rousing round of "the wonders of mechanical invention" or something like that. by then i'd spent 3 hours loading and unloading and driving back and forth, and working all day. i was pretty tired. but as a group, we did share the first/only pepper the garden produced this year, after all the wood was unloaded.

the next day was thursday, and i decided i better go and get the rest of the wood. thankfully, my boss brought in his pickup so i could use that instead of my car. what i didn't know was that the pickup had a topper on it, so i couldn't just go load crazy, but i was bound by the constraints of the topper. went home to see if anyone wanted to help. people were surfing the internet / playing on their computers / watching youtube / making dinner / hanging out with each other, and that apparently made them *too* busy to help me out (are we detecting a pattern?)

i went back, and loaded the truck filled as full as i could. some of the pieces are extremely heavy, it turned out, so i had to have some strategy as to how to get them into the truck. the thing of it was, this wood was in a big pile, but it wasn't a place i could put the truck easily. so i had to sort the wood into smaller pieces, toss those over to the tailgate, then toss them into the truck, then crawl into the truck to stack them all neatly and as tightly as possible. this was a big procedure. i knew i couldn't just casually toss the bigger pieces, so i rolled them end over end, over to the truck, and ended up putting them in last in order to save my back.

i took the first load, got the 2 guys to help me unload, then of course, dinner was ready, so i left and reloaded and was able to perfectly fit all the rest of the wood into the second load (insuring i wouldn't have to go back again)(i was VERY proud of my packing/conceptualizing skills in this moment). for though this wood was in town, it was almost as far away as it could be, since i live in the northwest and it was in the southeast, and there is NO good or direct way to get there. i don't drive around town on a regular basis, so by now i was pretty tired of driving. this set took me 3.5 hours, and still i had not eaten dinner. the guys helped me unload the second load, and we called it a day. i had kind of hoped to cover up the wood in case it rained, but it was all sprawled out and unruly so i kind of covered it with the tarps from the loading. luckily it did keep the wood covered and it did rain. sigh.

one thing that bothers me about my current living situation is the fact that i live with 2 guys, who both have their girlfriends living in the house with us right now. it's not permanent; one girl just got a place this week after having moved into town from colorado a couple weeks ago, the other girl has been around all summer after returning from the peace corps in africa and will be leaving to go to grad school in a couple of weeks. the issue is, with all the other girls around to draw their attention, my roommates are useless. it's like i don't exist in the house at all. like a ghost just around to be spooky and translucent.

before the internet, jason or girls arrived, zach and i would actually talk after work. he'd shoot hoops in the living room and we'd debrief each other about our day's work and experiences. it was like having a real friend in the house. i enjoyed getting to know zach and learn a little about what his experience was like as a first year teacher.

jason moved in sometime in may, and he made it known that "because he was going to be a student, he was going to need internet at the house." this didn't make a ton of sense to me, since he could do internet stuff at school, but zach decided he didn't want to go to the library for internet anymore, so they got it installed. i stayed out of it. i like my home time to be my own, where i can do home things and not be distracted by the vacuum that is the computer / internet world. i don't think they get that quite yet.

right after that, serena moved back from africa, and now she and zach were hanging out all the time. which, i probably would too if my boyfriend had been in africa for 2 years. i started working really wacky crazy hours at work, and/or was away because of dance camps and visiting my parents, so this didn't bother me too much. others vacationed or went off to do field work, and it was like a real summer vacation.

then, about 3-4 weeks ago, claire moved here from colorado. she is perhaps one of the sweetest people i've ever met in my life. she's just so nice. i'm pretty sure at the same time, zach and serena had some people come over as well. it was a VERY full house for a little while there, and people actually had to use the shower with the curtain that attacks you. of course, they didn't put down a bathmat, nor did they take my towel off the curtain rod while showering, so i woke to find that my towel was soaked and there was water all over the floor of my bathroom. thanks, visitors!

anyway, since all these people were around, i thought for sure at some point i'd have some people to talk to after long days at work by myself. but no. they are busy either talking with each other or, get this, surfing the internet individually on their own laptops, while sitting in the same room. there are 4 people and 4 laptops going sometimes in the living room/dining room area. it's nuts. you don't even need to converse with people anymore. as long as you have the internet.

back to my original point about firewood. one thing the guys said to me very clearly and with a lot of excitement was that they LOVED splitting firewood and were very eager to do so for the exercise effect.

on tuesday of last week, about 5 days after the firewood unloading bonanza, not one piece of firewood had been split.

scratch that.

jason had split the rotten birch logs into pieces. none of the NEW CHERRY firewood had been split. i wanted it split so it could fit in the stove and also so it could dry out. i also wanted to stack it in the shed so that it could stay dry. winter is coming and i'm not blind to that fact. i think they are.

i realized i had to take matters into my own hands. on wednesday, i took the day off work and after i finished at the soup kitchen, i went home, did several loads of laundry, got my firewooding clothes on, and went outside to attempt to make some sense of the wood pile.

first thing was to get the dry wood that was in there, out, so that it could be burned first while the other stuff dried out more thoroughly. (jon made a good point later that maybe i should mix it up, have some old and some new mixed in so that if we needed it, we'd have some later. what a smart man.) i tossed all of last year's stuff out. started sorting through the pile of new stuff, seeing what was manageable and what was too big. tossed the reasonably sized stuff to the woodshed, bigger stuff was set up around the yard for ease of splitting. i figured if it was sitting there looking at them, they'd be more likely to split it, vs in a big pile which looks way too daunting. then i started stacking.

after about an hour, jason got home / came outside and said, "what's going on out here?" i said, "well, i'm setting up logs that are too big so they can get split. or else, we can have a big pow wow." because it kind of looked like camp with a bunch of logs all around in a horseshoe shape. he seemed genuinely interested in helping out, so he got the wedge and sledgehammer and started splitting. it was fun to have 2 of us out there doing the work, vs just me. he lasted about an hour or less at this task, then went back inside to hang out with the girlfriend. maybe i would have done the same thing. but maybe my boyfriend would have come out to help with the firewood.

i continued tossing and sorting and stacking until it got dark. i went through the pile in the front yard and got it all piled up into pieces that need splitting and covered it with a tarp. i even put on my headlamp. i even smashed my face into the side of the roof of the shed, at which point i decided it was time to quit for the day. i had about 2 rows of wood under the shed, and i'd put some plastic along the back to keep rain water from getting in there since it's open. i was very proud of my efforts. i definitely feel a huge sense of accomplishment after moving wood around and getting it arranged like i want it. there's still more to do, but i had done what i could in the free time that i had. the internet can wait for winter in my opinion, when there's nothing left to do and we can sit around inside. in a way, it feels a little like that story about the grasshopper who just frolicked about and was having a grand old time in the summer, while the ants were busily storing food for the winter. my grasshoppers won't even realize what a service i've done them when it's cold and rainy and we have dry wood to keep us warm.

i went in to ice my face.