Busy Week

It has been a busy week. I started painting the house last week so then it started to rain. This early in the summer I figure I don't have to paint in the rain so didn't get much done. Wednesday was the Alaska Dogs Gone Wild summer solstice flyball tournament and since Maija and Scott were both competing we had to make time for that. I went on Wednesday and Mary went Thursday. Maija was running Zoom who was having a kind of bad day the day I was there, and Scott was running a borrowed dog since his Sweet Pea isn't ready for competition yet. Thursday after Mary left to watch flyball I was getting my painting things out when the telephone guy shows up to bury our line. We have been on a temporary line for about 3 months now so now that things have thawed out they were supposed to bury the line. The work order they gave the guy was not very well planned out. They had him going through a swamp to get to the phone box and that just wont work. So we spent a couple hours walking around in the woods to find an alternate way. Finally he called the engineer and told him to come out and look the options over and come up with a workable plan. Friday I went up to Brad and Maija's cabin to help Brad build the new deck to replace the one we tore down the previous weekend. We worked steady through the day except for a break Brad needed for a telecon he had to dial into for work, and got all the support work done. I was going to go up again Saturday but I wanted to wait until Scott got to our place so he could help me take a couple trees down that had been bent by heavy snow and were threatening the house. I got things mixed up because I thought he told me he had to work Saturday and would be up early in the afternoon. In fact he was at the flyball tourney until 4 o'clock so I wasted most of the day. I had pulled the chainsaw out and got it running and took one of the trees down before the saw stopped again. Around 5 I decided Scott wasn't coming so I figured out how to take the other tree down by myself without hitting the house and got my little electric chainsaw that is about 25 years old and took the tree down. That saw was ok to take the tree down with but since the chain oiler doesn't work I have to squirt oil on the chain after every cut so it doesn't over heat. For bucking up 2 60 foot trees the saw just wasn't going to work so I decided I would get a new GOOD chainsaw after doing a little research. I had been checking the weather up at Talkeetna on and off all day and it was pretty rainy so I figured Brad probably hadn't been able to get much done on the deck so I could go up Sunday to help him finish up and talk to him about chainsaws since he had just bought one. So Sunday I spent a couple hours laying decking and getting a hands on demo of Brad's chainsaw. The dealer is just down the road from the cabin so I stopped on the way home and bought a brand new Stihl chainsaw. It wasn't the model I had decided on because they were out of them but it was the next bigger model and wasn't much more expensive. I got it home and spent about an hour trying to get it started because I flooded the engine. Once I got it going it went through those trees I had cut down on Saturday like a hot knife in butter.

I plan on posting some pictures from flyball but I have to mow the grass before it starts raining again. Later.....