April 12, 2014 - A day outside

I got my trail run in yesterday before work so I could take full advantage of today.  The plan has worked out.  This is not a musing post - it's more of a "this is what I did today" post.  Pardon the pedantic nature, I just have to write these sometimes.

I got up this morning when I woke up - 7:00 or so - played a video game, and made breakfast.  Then I got dressed for working outside and got busy.  I have 4 main outside tasks to complete in relatively short order:
1) clean up the 2 trees we had felled 2 months ago.
2) complete the leaf cleanup.  I had it pretty well under control in the fall, but...winter wind and time move the pesky things, and they're messy.
3) open the pool
4) complete the deck railing

For most of these tasks, I need to use power equipment.  Specifically, to move the leaves, I need the leaf blower.  To move the leaves to where they belong (the deer depression by the porch), I need to move a 2.5' diameter tree trunk, which requires the chainsaw.  I've tried to start the chainsaw a couple times since my last successful attempt, and had no luck.  I've had similarly bad luck with the leaf blower.  Today I had to get them both working, or at least find a solution.

I trust the leaf blower the most.  It's a Husqvarna, and started on the 2nd pull when it was new.  I suspected my previous bad luck was due to flooding the engine or ambient temperature.  I set the choke and the throttle, and off it went.  I was in business!  Yeehaw!  The leaf blower is a magic wand, a way to change nature drastically without hurting it.  We have a lot of ground cover near the house, and the blower gently shakes the leaves out of the ground cover and hurls them away. It's my own personal tornado.  I love it.  I forgot until this evening that I had actually started the blower once last week, so I shouldn't have been surprised today.  Ah, well.

I started with the driveway area - the wind deposits leaves under the front porch and against that side of the house all winter.  It was pretty deep.  It took about half an hour to get the leaves out of the gravel and concrete, and another hour to get them and the leaves on the gravel over the ground cover and into the woods.  Happy with progress there, I turned to the chainsaw.  I suspected I had a bad switch of some kind.  The choke wouldn't stay pulled out, and I thought the mechanism to keep it out might be functioning poorly, so I took a strip of velcro and wrapped it around the choke with it pulled out, and tried to start the thing.  It successfully held the choke in place, which was great, but...

No luck.  I pulled and pulled, starting to sweat.  My second thought was that the on/off switch (which is configured to influence the choke position) might be a problem.  I wasn't able to move it up and down, despite trying to do so numerous times with a fair amount of force.  I didn't want to break the thing.  So I took off the engine cover, verified that the switch was designed to rotate and that it wasn't rotating, and then removed the switch.  Turns out the tension spring for the switch was sticking in the divot, so it was stuck in the "off" position.  I exercised it a couple times, confirmed it would move no problem, and put the engine cover back on.  My chainsaw is a 16" Poulan, the cheapest chainsaw with a decent review I could buy.  I'm very happy with it.

Flip the switch to on, pull the choke out, and it stayed!  First pull, it caught.  Set the choke to half, it took off.  Success!  I filled the engine with gas, added chain oil, checked chain tension, and off I went to cut our huge oak trunk up.  I learned last night that this is called "bucking".  I learned today that bucking a 30" trunk with a 16" chainsaw bar takes a long time and pretty good accuracy when setting the cut.  Nevertheless, I made 4 successful cuts, rolled 4 large wedges away into the meadow, and opened up a way to get leaves past the trunk and into the deer depression.  I cut up some brush, put the larger limbs in a pile to cut for kindling and towed the smaller limbs out to the property lines.

And then the leaf blower came back out.  The depression is now so full it's invisible, the ground cover is clear to grow.  The place looks much cleaner than it did, which was my goal for those pieces for today.  I said farewell to those tasks, changed into shorts, and started work on the pool.  I was just removing leaves and tightening the cover.  I got some of the outside chairs out of the basement, brought the pool pump out, and that was about it.  I actually got to sit by the pool (still covered) and read tonight.  It's been so long since I could do that comfortably.  Really exciting.  I can't wait for consistently warm weather again.

The kids cleaned their rooms, jumped on the trampoline, did laundry, and played Spyro (PS1 viedo game).  Katrina sprayed for bugs, took Aria to a first aid certification class, and then took off for a girls night with a friend who is soon moving to the West Coast.

It's been a really productive day, and a beautiful one.  We turned the heat in the house down to 63, and today it was up to 70 in the house.  Tomorrow is supposed to be even warmer.  Lovely weekend, couldn't be better.