4:56 PM ET 9/7/01
So Blogging again on a Friday afternoon and what a day it has been …
Got up early to stack wood. Stacking wood is part of the duties I have around her in order to keep a roof over my head. My folks split the house and their downstairs area is heated by a wood stove during the wintertime. Since my dad gave himself a heart attack and a stroke (two different years) messing with the wood, it’s been up to me to stack and haul wood each year so they have wood for the fire.
The wood situation is the funkiest thing you’ll ever see. We have a gravel driveway that stops at a hill down to the backyard. The hill is at such a slope that it is difficult to walk up, let alone, walk down with a cartful or an armful of wood. My dad had the heart attack one year because they used to have the truckload of wood dumped down the hill. So he’d go out there and stand at this really awful angle and try to haul the wood piece by piece down the hill. It was the “manly” thing to do. Since he has no common sense and no idea that when you do stuff like this you’re supposed to pace yourself, he’d go out for several hours on that hill until it was all done.
After his first wood related heart attack, I took over. Simply put, the whole dumping on the hill thing was something I tried once, ruined a pair of sneakers doing, and never repeated. It was just too damn hard to be at that slope (something near 78 to 80 degree), and haul wood down piece by piece. So I came up with something better: I had them dump the wood at the top of the hill on the flat driveway and then I just throw it piece by piece down the hill. Now that’s exhausting in itself (my dad’s stroke came the day after a day when he decided that he’d go out and throw/stack without telling any of us on a cold day when I wasn’t dumb enough to go out and try it), but it gets the job done and I get to sort out the kindling from the regular pieces of wood.
In the past I’d stack the wood in massive piles that all went the same way. For example, I’d have three or four rows of wood stacked above my head in horizontal piles like this:
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (H = horizontal row of wood)
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
It would be a real manly feeling of accomplishment as I finished because, dang it, I moved and stacked several tons of wood in a formation that went over my head. I could not see over the wood pile and that was good … well, until winter came and the piles started to collapse. Or it was snowy out and I’d slip and fall on my butt when I’d try to jump up to reach wood. I mean while it was a rugged and manly thing, it really didn’t make much sense to do it that way, as my best friend pointed out.
So last fall I thought long and hard about it. I swallowed my pride and I decided to stack the wood sort of like this:
HHHHVVVVHHHHVVVVHHHH (H = Horizontal stack, V = Vertical stack)
VVVVHHHHVVVVHHHHVVVV
HHHHVVVVHHHHVVVVHHHH
In Rows that alternated with each layer, so for example the layer on top of this would be:
VVVVHHHHVVVVHHHHVVVV
HHHHVVVVHHHHVVVVHHHH
VVVVHHHHVVVVHHHHVVVV
and the layer on top of that would be:
HHHHVVVVHHHHVVVVHHHH
VVVVHHHHVVVVHHHHVVVV
HHHHVVVVHHHHVVVVHHHH again.
There are a couple of advantages to this. First, when I was done, the same amount of wood that used to build huge piles over my head, was neatly piled in a rectangle formation that came up to my shoulder. No more having to climb up to get wood off the top. Second, it took up about half the space length wise (yes, size does matter — small is good!), and lastly, it was a whole hell of a lot more stable than a big pile stacked to the sky going the same way.
I realize this is boring wood talk but hey, this is a journal of my life and right now wood is my every morning. I hate it but it’s a workout and I owe the stacking design to my best friend. I don’t really remember how she did this, but at the time she was slowly trying to teach me how to get things in order. How much better things would be if instead of always being on the verge of collapse, they’d have some order to them and any collapses would be small and could be taken care of easily instead of blowing up into something bigger. She was applying it to my life at the time, but hey, it sort of worked out that when I started applying the concept to other things — like the gigantic piles of wood that fill my fall and wintertime.
I bring up my best friend here because her teaching me that order was a kind of cool thing was one of the reasons why I’ve spent the day uploading the new look of this page. We had been playing around with Macromedia Fireworks the other day for a project she was doing for in her off-time. She didn’t know Fireworks at all and wanted to do a kick ass web page for the group she was doing it for. The concept involved layers of moving pictures that would change as someone hovered a mouse over them with all the pictures housed in a little database like area where she could reuse the file for different pages. I didn’t know how the hell she could do it, but hey, we started messing with frames and with layers in Fireworks and we learned it together as we both messed around with the program.
She went on to create this massively huge kick ass site for the group. She’s still working on it now but what she’s done so far is simply brilliant — it’s a beautiful thing to see. When you click on the mouse overs the different layers pop up and there’s 20 or 30 different small pictures for page. I’m really impressed with what she did and I’m proud of her for sticking with it. She’s under a lot of pressure lately to get it done but she’s keeping her own pace and frankly, I’m just happy that she didn’t say F* it and walk away from it.
While she was designing her page I had an idea to take the concepts we learned together and apply them to this page. Let’s face it, the main screen was getting a little cluttered. With the layout we had people weren’t seeing all the options on the site and I was getting a lot of complaints from people who simply couldn’t find the latest issue. I addressed this by putting the newest stuff at the top of the page and reversing the season list, but even then, the fact was something I had to face — as we got more and more strips, the site was becoming harder and harder to navigate.
k9