There’s So Many Trees Down At The Moment
I have wood heating at my place. Wood heating means that I have a heater that runs on wood and I have to have plenty of wood to feed it every day I run the heater.
It’s a good heater, it works well and it puts out plenty of heat, so I can’t complain. But it takes a lot of work.
I have my own supply of wood at my place. I have quite a few trees and so I wait till one falls down then I cut it up. I have to cut it into pieces about a foot 6 inches long then each piece I have to split till it’s in sizes I can use in my wood heater.
It’s pretty hard work cutting wood. You have a number of jobs to do. First you have to cut the tree into rounds. I use a chainsaw for that and it takes quite a while to cut up a tree. If it’s a big tree it can take 2 or 3 hours and if it’s a really big tree then maybe a day.
It’s hard work, you sweat a lot if it’s hot. You cut up every single piece into rounds, and then you’ve got your tree sitting there in pieces. Next comes splitting it.
I use a hand splitter. I have used a hydraulic one before and I should again. Hand splitting is really hard work. Basically it’s just a heavy axe and it uses the weight to help the axe go through and split the wood. But you still have to swing it like an axe.
After an hour or so of hand splitting it gets really hard. I can’t do more than a couple of hours then I’ve had it. That’s why I hired a hydraulic splitter one year. It was all done in a day and it was so much easier than hand splitting, but it cost.
Once I’ve split my firewood I have to cart it to a pile next to my shed where it sits for a year or 2 till it’s dry enough. If you try to burn it when it isn’t dry enough it will burn, but it will burn too cool and the fire won’t put out any heat.
And then after a couple of years of sitting next to the shed I have to cart it into the shed where it can stay dry through the winter. If course it’s no use if it’s wet to you need to keep it dry.
Lots of work with all that isn’t there?
Anyway the point of all this is that I have plenty of trees down at the moment. We had a huge wind last weekend and a few trees came down, so I have lots of work ahead of me cutting and splitting wood, not to mention stacking and carting it.
Still, I have enough wood to keep me warm and that’s got to be good hasn’t it?
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
What Goes On Around My Place?
I really love cows. They’re such lovely animals, almost a half ton in weight but so gentle. I’ve never seen an aggressive cow. Bulls maybe, but not cows. Even my kids can pat them as long as they’re feeding them, the cows don’t necessarily like being patted but they’ll stand there and be patted if they’re getting fed. They just pull back a little when you try and pat them.
The best time to pat them is when you feed them hay. They just love hay, and when the grass growth is getting slow because winter is coming you need to supplement their feed with hay or something else. I have hay.
Now of course if you are feeding the cows hay you’re committed to feeding them every day. Every day even if you’re not feeling like it, or maybe it’s raining. If you don’t feed the cows they starve which isn’t good. And if you are feeding them hay that’s the time to pat them.
I feed them myself. I like my holidays though so when you go away you have to have something to do so that the cows are fed. I do this.
I have various paddocks each fenced off. 4 in total. So when I have plenty of grass in the paddocks I lock one up and leave it with the long grass in it. Then when I go away I open the gate to that one and the cows discover that the gate is open and head in there.
And the cows aren’t silly, they know that there’s grass in there somewhere when they look through the gate so once I open the gate they’re right in there as fast as they can.
And then I come back from the holiday and my cows are happy. And I take them out of the grass paddock and put them back in the main paddock.
I feed them immediately after breakfast. They know exactly when I feed them and when I come out to feed theyre sitting right in front of the shed with the hay in it waiting for their breakfast. I usually give them 1 1/2 bales of hay. Sometimes when I feel generous I give them 2 bales.
In fact this morning I gave them 2 bales. But it’s getting warmer soon and the grass is beginning to grow and that’s good because I don’t have a lot of hay left. But that’s ok because I’ve got more grass coming.
My cows are happy now.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
Have You Got A Boat. I Do And I Love It.
I just love having a boat. As it says on a sticker on my boat, life is better with a boat. It’s only small, maybe 11 feet, I can’t afford a big one, but a small boat is better than no boat. And it’s got it’s advantages, it’s easy to tow.
Last week was school holidays to I took may family, including my kids, away for a few days. 4 days actually at a small resort about 5 hours drive away. Unfortunately there was a really strong wind and heavy rain when we left and I thought it was going to be a really rough drive but the wind dropped and the rain stopped after about a half hour, the sun came out and it turned into a pretty nice day.
It was a nice place to go to. There was so many things for the kids to do it wasn’t funny. Kids need so much to do. So if you’ve got bored kids there’s problems, if you’ve got bored kids then they hassle you constantly for something to do.
There really isn’t anything worse than bored kids to kill a holiday. They get really grumpy and annoy me and as I like to read a book it’s no fun being hassled by bored kids all the time.
But the kids were happy over the weekend, thankfully. There were so many things that they could do, including jumping up and down on this huge plastic blow up thing, and they just loved that. That alone kept them happy.
And there was this massive tv for them to watch in the games room and every night there was a kids movie to watch so they loved that too.
And it’s amazing how something like a simple swimming pool can keep kids entertained for hours and hours. I can swim for a little while then I get bored.
But I mentioned the boat. I took the boat along because there was a river there and I could take them on the river. And it’s useful for taking stuff along too. The kids bikes wouldn’t fit in the car but no problem getting them in the boat.
So the boat was great. We did a couple of days in the boat. One was on the local river just looking around, a little time spent sitting on the bank having lunch and giving the kids a swim. More swimming! And we could sit there in the sun and read our books.
And near us was a lake too and we decided to spend some time on the lake. I had already bought a tube that towed along on the boat behind so that the kids could ride on it. They did it last summer and liked that so I decided to throw that in and was glad I did. In fact it was hard to get them off of it.
So that’s our holiday with the boat.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
Birds Birds And More Birds
I just love living in the country and I’m happy to say so. I’ve talked about that before.
But I didnt talk about the birds. I like birds.
There’s really a stunning number of birds out here, so many you can’t believe it. Maybe it’s because there’s so many trees in the country. The birds list in the trees and pick off the pods from the leaves and eat them, you can see them doing it all day. They pick them off with their claws and hold them to eat.
Now I have to say that I like birds but I dont like the damage they do to my trees. They break off so many small branches to get to the pods that under the tree looks like a wasteland. Theres bits of trees everywhere.
Mainly theyre parrots. They so colorful that I just love to sit and watch them sit in the trees. I even get them sitting around my veranda, sometimes if Im lucky I get them sitting right on the window sills. And theyre so colorful that I just sit still so I dont scare them away and watch them.
Now of course youve got to offset the damage the birds do with the benefits of having them around. And as I like to have the birds I just have to put up with the tree damage. And so I do.
That’s why I love the country, things like parrots. And other animals too. You don’t get parrots in the city and that’s sad, there’s not enough trees and too many people. Far too many people. Nothing for the parrots to eat and people to scare them away.
And as I say I like all animals not just birds. Animals are so great to have around, as good as birds. I love them all.
Its good for the soul I think. Having birds and animals around is a part of nature and a part of life. Its not sterile like in the city. Birds and animals for me any day. Just right now as I was writing this a whole bunch of them flew right past the window. I can see one of them sitting on the verandah in front of me right now.
I’m not interested in going back to live in the city. There’s so many things that I love about it out here, not just animals and birds.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
The Weekend Is All Over But It Was Worth It
Well it’s all over, the weekend is finished. It was just fantastic to get away, I need to get away more often, it’s good for the soul. But it was a little tough starting quite so early. Too early for me.
5 in the morning is too early for me. Way too early. At 5 am even the birds aren’t awake. It is completely dark and feels like it’s about 1am. It’s pretty hard to get out of bed at that time, though when you’ve got a weekend to go to it’s still worth getting up. Something to get up for.
I picked up my friend and we got started. He had a lot of gear to load into the car and we took longer to get going than I thought was a good idea. Because we were meeting some other cars there and the meeting was at 9am, so we had to get started and get there on time.
And by the time we got there it was raining which was really annoying. And we’ve had such good weather over the last few weeks to have it raining the exact weekend that I go away is pretty frustrating, but there’s nothing you can do about it is there? What can you do about weather?
And when you’re camping in a tent the last thing you want is rain. Rain is the worst thing because when something gets wet it’s wet for the whole time unless it gets warm again. Luckily the rain was heavy but when we were putting up the tent it eased off a little. Some luck at least. And it was a long drive in the rain.
And most annoyingly when we were driving there seemed to be all sorts of new speed limits to annoy me.
But even despite all this it was a good weekend. I did some fishing and caught a fish and we had it for dinner which was nice. Fresh fish tastes great.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
Wow I Have A Real Treat Coming Up This Weekend.
I have a treat coming up this weekend, I get to go on a holiday.
And this time I can’t go with my family because they all have some concert to go to that I’m not particularly fond of so they can’t come and I get to go with a friend.
We are planning to camp. I have a great tent, canvas, water proof, big enough to be comfortable and its forecast to rain, so I may need all of that. I hope it doesnt rain because rain isnt what you need when you go camping.
We leave Friday morning at about 6 am. We’re meeting some other people at 9 and it will take about 3 hours to get to where we’re meeting. I don’t really like getting up early, good thing I don’t have to too often.
As much as I hate to get up early if you’re looking forward to something you just get up and go anyway, so it’s not so much of a problem.
I hope the car does ok, its not really old but its not new either and Id hate to think the car let me down and didnt make it.
Saturday is going to be a free day. Nothing planned at all, just a hang about day to do what you want. I plan to take fishing gear along and do some fishing, in fact I bought a new fishing rod this morning. Sadly I broke my old fishing rod a while ago.
I made that fishing rod when I was about 25. I bought the blank and I bought the whipping and the rod varnish and all the other bits and pieces that go into making a fishing rod. I was pretty pleased with myself that I managed to make my own fishing rod.
Ive used that fishing rod for a lot of years now, and it was a sad day when I broke it. I dont even know how I broke it, I was just walking through the trees and suddenly I noticed the tip of the rod broken off hanging in its own. Boy was I pissed.
It wasn’t as if it was worth a lot of money. It was just the sentimental value to me because I made it myself and I’d broken it. So today I went to a fishing gear shop and bought a new one.
Not that new fishing rods are all that expensive now. It was only $27 so I cant complain. It was just that that fishing rod was my own rod, no one else had a rod like mine.
I suppose they’re all made in China now, that’s why they’re so cheap. Hope it lasts. So that’s my weekend coming up. I hope I get a few fish and it doesn’t rain too much. Ill write about it soon.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
You’ve Got To Keep Fit Haven’t You?
Everyone loves something, for me it’s cycling.
I found cycling relatively recently. I was getting unfit and I didn’t want to be unfit, and I was getting older. I knew I had to do something.
Swimming never did it for me. I mean swimming is boring, really boring. You just swim up and down, up and down, up and down. For hours and hours. Actually it only feels like hours and hours, I rarely swim for more than about 20 minutes, that’s about as long as I can stand the boredom.
There’s a black line and you just spend your time watching that black line, because of course there’s nothing else to watch other than that black line. Now that’s what I call boring.
If you really want to get fit you need to swim at least 4 times a week, probably more. And if you find something boring then you’re not going to do it 4 or 5 times a week and keep at it are you?
And you don’t just swim for 10 minutes. You swim for a minimum of at least 30 m inutes. It seems that that is a minimum and you really should do more than 30 minutes.
So once I decided I didn’t like swimming I really had to find something else. And like swimming I found running really boring too so that was out. What to do? Then I thought about cycling.
I didn’t have a bike although I used to ride to work many years ago. My old bike was up at the shed but its so rusted that its unusable. I knew I had to get another bike. And a new bike isn’t cheap.
But I found out that there was a cycling club near me and they were starting up a new cycling recreation group. The ideal time to buy a bike and take up cycling.
And right from the start once I joined the new cycling group I enjoyed the riding. They varied their rides and did longer and shorter ones. But I did find that the pace of riding was not right for me.
I’m not exactly young but despite that I really felt that I could ride harder than the recreational group did, that it was a good social situation but I wanted to get fit and do a workout and it was too slow for my liking. So I started riding on my own to get a faster ride in and workout more.
So after a while riding on my own I found that it was nice to ride hard but a little lonely. I was getting a workout but on my own. So I made some enquiries and found out that there was a riding group that rode out of town a few days a week that used road bikes and rode hard. It went sundays and I decided to go along.
But the bike that I had already bought was a half mountain bike and half road bike, called a hybrid, and so I had the wrong bike again. So again I had an issue with no bike that would do the job, but by then I knew I really liked riding to I bought a road bike and joined the Sunday group. They ride pretty fast and sometimes I keep up, occasionally I don’t keep up.
But what I wanted was a hard workout and that’s what I get on the Sunday ride.
So that’s my cycling career. I love it, I ride 4 times a week and I’m getting fitter.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
I Live In The Country. Well Why Would Anyone Live In The City?
It’s the country that I live in and I really like it. Living in the country is a treat and it’s something that I’ve done for quite a few years now. I grew up in the city but you wouldn’t get me back there again.
And there’s so much out here in the country that you’ll never see living in the city. Here’s an example of my own. Cycling. I love to cycle and it keeps me fit which is so important. But it’s great for so many other reasons. It gets me outdoors to places that are so great to be in.
Around me theres so much to cycle past. Fields with cows, sheep and goats. Horses too, though I dont like horses so much. But I love cows and sheep. I have my own cows, each with its own calf, and I love them dearly.
It’s just one of the best things of living here, I get to keep cows and calves. I love that and all of the nature around me.
It’s really hot today and I don’t like heat, but it’s summer and there’s nothing I can do about it is there? If it’s hot it’s hot. But it’s still better here than in the city, if I lived in the city it would still be hot. Out here I see nature and the seasons and I see them come and go. I get to see the grass start to grow after winter and I see the leaves change color and fall and regrow.
I see the leaves of the trees turn different colors, there’s so many wonderful colors. I see the new trees growing underneath the old ones when the seeds germinate. I see the old and the young, I see the new and the not so new.
All of these things cycle, just like I cycle. They go round and round and I really see what the seasons are.
If I lived in the city I mightnt even have a garden. I mightnt have a tree at all. I might have a lot of concrete, I might have pavers and a BBQ, but I mightnt have a tree or a blade of grass.
And unlike here I probably wouldn’t get to see the seasons change like I do now.
Personally I think it’s sterile in the city and of course that’s just my view, not everyone thinks that.
Of course my family lives in the city and they love it. My brother is a doctor and hes single, so he likes the social life of the city. Theres things to do there that hes into, and it suits him. But the city is not for me.
I grew up in the city and spent most f my life there. Then it was fine but it really feels now as if I wasted a lot of time in the city, I wish I’d been born in the country instead. I feel a little like I wasted a lot of my life in the city, that’s sad isn’t it? I didn’t really waste it of course but it feels that way. I should ask my brother if he’d like to live here but I doubt he would. He likes the city.
Give me the country any time. There’s nothing better, I think I’m here till the day I die.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
I Just Love The Day
It’s a stunning day outside and I’m loving it. It’s warm and it’s still and it’s balmy and that’s just how I like it. It’s a perfect day really. Perfect for me.
But what is a perfect day for me may not be a perfect day for you. Perhaps you’ve had some really bad news or maybe you’re sick or maybe you just don’t feel yourself today. It’s all different for you than it is for me.
But it’s different for you than it is for me. It’s entirely subjective and that’s why it may be wonderful for me and terrible for you. My day is the best ever, yours is the worst.
So I wonder what it is that makes it such a nice day for me and what it is that might make it such a bad day for you. It’s not about the day itself is it? It’s the same day for me as it is for you. I see the sunshine, maybe you don’t. I see the cows in the fields but maybe you don’t even notice them.
Maybe you see terrible things in the day, all bad, darkness. The best day for me is the worst day for you.
Surely the only explanation is that it’s in our minds, the day. We see the day through the filter of our minds. We don’t see the day, we see what our minds tell us the day is like. We filter the day through our minds and our experiences.
I even think it’s possible that if you and I have the exact same experience of the day we will see it totally differently. You come for a drive with me and we see different things. You see the same cows, the same sunshine, the same people, but maybe you don’t even see them. Maybe you see something completely different. You mind registers the same things as mine, and records it, but it filters it all through the experiences you’ve had in the past and mine does that too, and that makes our experience of the day different.
There’s some of my silly rantings. I was just thinking about this stuff today, that’s all. Don’t be offended by jmy silly stuff.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off
I Write For Myself But I Like To Put It On The Internet.
I just love to write. Since I was young I’ve loved to write and I still do. I remember when I was about 10 or 11 at school I wrote story after story, my teacher was stunned that I could write so much at such an early age.
I did a university degree when I got older, but it didn’t include writing, though I wish now it had. If I was young again and going to university all over again I’d think about doing some real study about the art of writing. I studied what I needed to to get a job, I just wish I’d studied what I liked to do.
It’s an interesting question about whether I could ever have become good enough at writing to make a living from it. Who knows. But if I had the chance then I should have tried, after all if you don’t try you never know if you can really do it. I should have tried.
Writing is a skill like any other skill. Of course you need to have a the desire to write, if you dont then youre not going to get far because its also work just like anything else, and if you dont enjoy it then you wont get far.
If you really love it then you’ll take the time you need to take to develop it till you’re good at it. It really will take time but I’m sure it can be done. You need to work on it every day but if you love doing it then that’s no problem. Every day is fine.
And now that there’s the internet it’s fun to put it here and see it available to the world, even if in reality no one actually visits it. I don’t care.
So I have this website and this is where I’m going to practice my writing. I have it on the internet as it’s a convenient place to have it, but I really don’t intend for lots of people to come along and read it.
It’s pretty boring really, well not to me but it might be to you. But I really enjoy it. If you like writing you might think about having your own website too. It’s fun, it doesn’t cost that much.
Filed Under All about Tony | Comments Off