Life in bush Alaska is not always easy! A lot of times, life here is real hard, and you have to do hard work to survive. When spring and summer come around, you usually find most people who want to stay warm in the winter out harvesting wood. Usually that means either going by snow-machine into the woods and cutting down trees and then pulling the big logs back to your house. The other way to get wood is to wait till the river ices melts and then retrieve wood that is floating down the river. Since we live a little ways from the river it is more economical for us to harvest wood in the forest, not out of the river. After you get you huge pile of logs, we wait till warmer temps arrive and then we start to cut the logs into pieces big enough for our wood stove. All of this process is hard work but it is a rewarding kind of work, because I guarantee that come winter when I am lighting up a fire to heat my house, I can say " I worked hard for this wood and this fire feels SOOOO good!" It is very Rewarding.YES! I know! Call me crazy but I think it actually very enjoyable to cut and stack wood. Even though it is hard and after doing it a whole day your body begs for you to not lift anything else, I really enjoy it. Jason Harris (our Neighbor and great friend) says the only real reason I enjoy it is because it smells like Christmas all day!! OK so secretly I want to cut wood all day to smell like Christmas!.... UH No , If I wanted to smell Christmas all day I would light a candle. =) But it did smell like Christmas! And it smelt GOOOOOOOOD! And many times when he would cut through a spruce log I would just pause and savor that smell. Oh how I love it!
Jason Harris was an amazing help and chainsawed all the wood while I built holders and stacked the wood. He was such a blessing to show up at our house and say our wood pile was on his "To Do" list. But that is the type of community we have up here! The kind where people have you on their list of people to help. Thanks Jason for all you help!! With Keith's back giving him trouble it was nice to have some one helping me with the brunt of the work! YOU ARE CAPTAIN AWESOME!! (Sorry Mike Holst, you got demoted, at least in this area of life!)=)
A day of cutting wood is where Hollywood comes into my life. After working for a few hours we started to feel VERY VERY blessed to have a chainsaw and NOT live in the time period where you had to cut it all by hand! Can you Imagine having to cut HUGE trees BY HAND with a hand saw. No thanks! That is a little to roughin it for me! But Jason was right when he made the comment that "I think about what life would be like if we had to cut everything with a saw, but that is as far as I get." At that comment Seven Brides for Seven Brothers started playing across my mind. We both decided we might just have to write our own Galena Musical "Galena Under the Moon Light" or "Northward the Women". I can even hear the songs from the show and see the awesome dance numbers we could do! Jason and Keith jumping over logs and doing cool flips. =) If you have never seen Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, you will have no idea what I am talking about. It is a classic movie and one of my favorites! Starring Howard Keel and Jane Powell. Thankfully Jason has seen it or he might have thought I had lost my mind when I started singing "Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo a man can't sleep with a herd of sheep, oooooooooooooooooo"CHOP(with the ax) Though I think We can promise you they did NOT dance around with real axes. Ours is REALLY heavy and there is no way you could swing it around with as little effort as they did! But I do love that movie and thinks everyone should watch it! Many times up here I feel like I am stuck in that movie. I just wish I had the cool skirts and could do country dancing like they did!=) Again if you haven't seen the movie, I have probably lost you! =) You should see it! It is awesome! Thanks to Jason's help we did get out wood cut and stacked and drying for winter! Here are some pictures I thought you would like to see of us working.
Here is a picture from the movie Seven Brides For Seven Brothers.
This is the part of the movie where they sing the song
"Ooooooooooooooooooooooooo, Can't make no vows to a herd of cows." CHOP (with the ax =)
Here is Jason cutting the wood while I sing
"Oooooooooooooooooooo, can't shoot the breeze with a bunch of trees" CHOP
This is the pile when it is almost done. Of course I didn't think of taking pictures BEFORE we started cutting the pile.
My new wood frame
ALL DONE! And now this is the future site for our new wood shed we will build when we get back from barge shopping. It will be nice to have all the wood in one place and not scattered all around our yard in different piles.
Stacked in a few places but these 2 frames held the bulk of it.
Hopefully this will all go into our wood shed when we build it.
LOVE
This picture above was one that I saw and couldn't help but take the picture. This log looks just like a heart. And it shows even though life is rough some times, I love it!
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