Sweet revenge

We hit a seasonal milestone at Goat Rope Farm this week with the first lighting of the wood stove. As hot as this summer and fall have been, it didn't seem like that day would come.

This year, I am deriving particular gratification from throwing wood in the fire. Usually, our woodpile is collected here and there on a casual basis, but last year it got personal when some trees of ours fell on a neighbor's yard.

I have engaged in single combat with those suckers since the Christmas holidays, chainsawing, hand sawing, lifting, loading, splitting and generally making little ones out of big ones. Those trees had some really knotty parts and were hell to split. I'm pretty sure that I expended more energy on the chopping some of them than they will yield in the burning.

It is probably not an admirable personal trait to hold grudges against no-longer-animate objects, but I derive satisfaction from singling out the toughest pieces and tossing them in the stove with a farewell greeting along the order of "I've got you now, you ___________."

AIN'T WE GOT FUN. The Rev. Jim Lewis goes Gatsby in his latest edition of Notes from Under the Fig Tree. (As I mentioned before, we have a few fig trees here and it would be hard for a cat to get under them--I don't see how he does it.)

GETTING ATTENTION. The weird race to fill the late Senator Byrd's seat caught the attention of the New York Times.

UNSAFE. This Washington Post article from earlier this week looks at mine safety--or the lack of it.

WORKING ON A MYSTERY. New clues have emerged in the great honeybee die-off.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED