Skip to main content

Gardening with an axe

Our marvellous landlord (Shane) visited today and officially started the wet season by attempting to do some gardening with a 5-kilo-ish axe. He had about half an hour before the weather got the hint, and managed to weight-loss the tree in question by about 100kg in that time, plus get it dragged and stacked out in the front yard for Council pickup.

Shane then had lunch, which put said weather off-stride, then returned and completed the job in the dry — to the complete fascination of our littlest girl.

Shane’s early-teen son did a very efficiant and neat job of “tidying” then exporting (wheelbarrowing) the smaller sections of tree with a 2-3kg axe at the same time. Small Sir, watching from the balcony, was definitely impressed by the speed and neatness of Master Early-Teen’s mission. Note to self: no axes in Small Sir’s or Small Madam’s sight/reach until after real training has happened for each (and for me as well, come to consider things — ’s been a few years now since I hefted one earnestly, and then there’s the recent-ish head and other damage).

Comments

Leon RJ Brooks said…
Oh, and if you want to see heavy... then a “small” weeping willow tree would be a good place to start. Brother-in-law James G-E got given one – about six feet tall implanted — and the skinny, innocuous little ≈2m shrub must way well clear of 100kg.

Assisting (1 in 5 adults) in lugging the unruly, unstable thing out of a trailer drove a very pretty, reserved (kinda) and decorous lass to swear outright in front of me (several events, all English because Deutsch was apparently not flavoursome enough) for the first time(s) ever in well past a decade – and another pretty, very polite & thoughtful lass in this team to the absolute brink of following suit.

It’s not (quite) Jarrah, and Wandoo it is most definitely not (Wandoo is pretty much the closest thing to natural grown high-density steel which I know of in Australia — at least twice as dense as Jarrah, plus many times harder), but it does have a unique section of the abuse-athon firmly set aside for itself now.

I also ran across an unusual piece of reasoning, en passant. A core principle in biological evolution is that the rank of most successful variant (or whatever) is awarded by head-count. Australian evolution people, if they believe the theory as practiced in real life, must therefore adopt the leading philosophical viewpoint apparently shared by over 12 million fellow Australians: Christianity.

I expect at least occasional, [umm...] ongoing adaptation issues, including consequential coronary disorders amongst both teams. ⌣
29 April, 2006 13:21
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Open and Shut response to Darl McBride

Hi, Darl. I see you’re being dishonest again . It’d be really nice if you could shoot straight for a change, but I think Kerry’s Dad will be selling snowplows in Hell first. Three years ago, when I first joined The SCO Group, we focused the company on the area that was most profitable and provided the most benefit to customers, investors, resellers, developers and employees: UNIX No, you focused the company on suing people, which was most profitable to lawyers and provided some golden parachutes for your buddies. People thought we were crazy. They were right. But since SCO owns the UNIX operating system The SCO Group does not own UNIX® in any sense of the word. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, definition and other rights , The SCO Group does not. The SCO Group doesn’t even own the UnixWare® or OpenServer® code, the rights to those are held by Novell and TSG use them only by permission and under certain conditions — which they have violate...
5 comments
Read more

5x7 text dot-matrix in five minutes...

This is a fairly primitive toy I threw together today for a specific purpose, published in case it’s any use to others... feed it a list of words as command arguments, which it will then display as a 5x7 ASCII dotmatrix with ‘#’ as a dot & ‘_’ as a blank. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, ...
5 comments
Read more

Citizens Augmenting Government Waste

So here we have Microsoft-funded “ Citizens Against Government Waste ” (CAGW) heavily criticising Massachusetts’s switch to an internationally accepted and open document standard (not open source, open standard — but I seem to remember a large monopolist who frequently confuses the two when it suits them). I remember CAGW, they were the organisation who had dead people writing in to support Microsoft in court a few years ago — thanks to sbergman27 for the link — is this “the dead hand of CAGW” at work again? Let’s follow the money and find out. Who stands to lose the most money and control if Massachusetts switches to an unencumbered document format? Big surprise, it’s CAGW sponsor Microsoft, through their dominant MS-Office suite. Why did CAGW list Microsoft’s suite last, after two other much-less-dominant examples which are waning anyway? If you’re inclined to wallow in additional irony, consider that at leas...
Post a Comment
Read more