From what I have been reading, it takes about a “season” for firewood to dry (or season) enough to burn. That’s about nine months. There are a bunch of factors, including temperature, if the wood is covered or not, stacked in sunlight or not, air flow, wood type and a bunch of other things. It also depends on if the wood is split or not. Split wood takes less time to dry.
I read that there is also a debate on whether it’s better to cover a pile of wood or if it’s better to leave it uncovered. Some people say it’s better to cover the wood because the rain water won’t get to it. Others say that covering it will only trap the moisture in and rot the pile of wood. Who knows…I leave it uncovered, except if it’s going to snow. I think the best thing would be to cover the pile with plywood. That way, no rain water gets on the wood, yet the airflow is maintained.
Pile of fire wood.
The reason I am talking about this is because, as you already know, we are getting a pellet stove installed in the basement. This leaves the fireplace in the living room able to burn regular wood. I am considering putting a wood burning stove into the existing fireplace.
For the past few days, I have been nibbling away at the wooded lot on the side of the house. There is a lot of land there and I think it could look quite nice if it was cleaned out. There are many large Oaks and Hickory trees, but many smaller Maples and Birches as well. I am taking down the smaller trees to open up the area and let some filtered sun come in. My goal is to clean it up to look like a park. I am cutting all the trees into firewood length pieces and stacking it up in back. The photo you see above is the actual wood. I am pretty sure this will not be burnable this season, but next season for sure.
Well, I recieved the new Dell T7400 workstation yesterday, a day early. I met the FedEx guy in the garage. He warned me that the box was heavy.
I unpacked the box and took the computer out. It was pretty heavy. I brought it upstairs and made room for it on my desk. I set everything up and turned the sucker on. I must say, it is pretty much like my other computer, except 10x more expensive.
I do notice some speed increases with certain things, but I am not really doing anything that requires all this processor yet. Regarding moving around all those files, I would say this new system has helped out greatly.
Here are some photos…
My desk with both computers on it.
Front view of the Dell Precision T7400 workstation.
Side view of the Dell Precision T7400 workstation.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, it’s pretty large too. My other computer is tiny compared to it.
Texas likes to do everything big, including wind farms and investing in clean energy. The states has been given the thumbs up for a $4.9 billion plan to set up transmission lines to carry the wind power generated in West Texas to surrounding urban areas.
The history of scientific discovery is full of missteps. Sometimes iffy ideas lead to stronger theories. Other times, a good idea becomes a bad idea. And still others seem like they were always bad ideas.
Princeton economist Alan Blinder proposes that ‘Cash for Clunkers’ programs under which the government buys up some of the oldest, most polluting vehicles and scraps them, should be expanded nationwide.
An entrepreneur with $60 million in venture funding says he’s found an endless source of cheap energy. Trouble is, it violates the laws of quantum physics.
Today, we went back to Devil’s Hopyard State Park in East Haddam for what turned out to be a grueling two mile hike. It felt good, but there was a lot of sweat involved. We went uphill and downhill and everywhere in between. You should’ve seen me huffing and puffing like a fat guy at the tops of the hills. All this hiking should get me in better shape though.
We hiked the entire orange trail which brought us up to the vista, which was very nice. Then, the trail brought us down to the river again and past the Devil’s Oven. We walked back up to the bridge and past the falls to the car.
I took some more photos of various areas of the orange trail. I really have to stop taking so many pictures. Laura is starting to call me a tourist. Hey, this is the way I live. I am on my third digital camera because I like to use them so much. Also, somebody has got to like these things besides me.
I tried to find the simplest theme on the planet and this is one of them. I am sick of all the fluff. Also, the page load time is much faster with this theme because it is “table-less” and no post images show on the homepage. That was a problem for those of you with slower connections.
The only bad thing is now you guys are going to have to click on each post title to see if there are any photos in it. Sorry about that. Maybe there is a way to get thumbnail photos on the homepage or something. I am sure I can figure it out. Until then, enjoy the new theme and just assume that I put photos in almost every post.
Watch this entire video and you be the judge. Sure, maybe the squirrel is eating the crumbs the birds dropped in back of the feeder tray, but I would say the squirrel proof bird feeder is rather effective.
This is round two of the squirrel proof bird feeder videos. I am pretty sure I can’t get better footage than this, so this will (thankfully) be the last one.
As I have mentioned before, Connecticut is the place to be if you like parks, hiking, mountain biking and recreation in general. We are learning that people around here take this stuff very seriously. When driving around, it’s hard not to see people jogging, riding bikes, playing golf…whatever.
Last week, we decided to drive down to East Haddam to visit Devil’s Hopyard State Park. I looked at this park’s trail map online and it looked good. The thing that really attracted me was the waterfall. As usual, I opened up Google Earth and checked it out from above. Well, all it looked like was woods. I don’t know, after seeing the satellite view, I didn’t think it looked all that great. We went anyway. I am usually wrong about these things.
I was really wrong about this one. I have been to many state parks in my life and I have to say this one was the best so far. The water does it for me. It’s a very low-key park. There are no highways around and it’s tucked back in the woods. The waterfall is great and the river adds a lot to the hike. This park is going to be on our list for a long time. They also offer camping, which is cool.
I took a bunch of pictures and will add captions where I think they would fit.
We parked on Helon Cone Rd., right off of Hopyard Rd. This was the enterance sign to Devil's Hopyard State Park.
Chapman Falls on Helon Cone Rd.
Stone bridge on Hopyard Rd.
Random photo of stones that make the stone bridge.
Nice rock I found.
The beginning of the unblazed trail heading towards the bottom of Chapman Falls.
I know it’s only July, but believe it or not, that’s about two months too late when someone is trying to get a pellet stove installed.
I stopped by the local pellet stove store the other day to pick out my new Harman P68 Pellet Stove. This is top of the line and has everything I want in a stove. There is a thermostat and auto light and everything else I can think of. You can understand my excitement about this after I received a “price lock-in” at $4.85 a gallon from our heating oil company. As it turns out, a lot of other people are excited about Harman stoves as well.
I walked into the store and told the sales guy that I wanted a…He said, “If you are going to say Harman, you aren’t going to see it for a while.” He explained that all the Harman stove models are way back ordered and I wouldn’t see it until way into the season. While this annoyed me, it also gave me a chance to look at some other stoves.
I looked around and picked out a St. Croix Prescott EXL. This has the thermostat option as well as auto-light. When it gets too hot, the fire goes out. When it gets too cold, the stove automatically fires up again and cooks until the whole thing happens again. I am telling you, these things have come a long way.
I put a deposit down on that stove and they are going to come do a site visit, just to make sure the whole thing is going to work out, permit-wise. I think it will.
I also looked at some wood stove inserts for the fireplace upstairs. They look really good. I told the guy that I really wasn’t all too attracted to bringing wood inside again, since my childhood was filled with that. Then, he showed me the bio-brick. A bio-brick is a two pound brick made out of compressed saw dust. Basically, it is a big wood pellet. You can order them by the ton, just like pellets. I though this was wicked cool and now plan on getting a regular wood stove insert for the fireplace next season.
I will let you know what happens with the site visit.
Last night, after we went to Circuit City, we stopped by The Promenade Shops at Evergreen Walk in South Windsor, CT. It’s near Manchester. We had to visit Pottery Barn to get some plates and napkins and things like that.
I am not even sure how this turned into a blog post, but since I did have my new camera on me and the night was just perfect, I started shooting away. Leave it to me to suck the romance out of anything. It was quite romantic. It was dark out and there were so many couples holding hands. Just as I was mentioning to Laura that everyone was holding hands, I realized that I wasn’t. I grabbed her hand and made a night of it. Of course, she looked up at me with that big smile.
I told you I took some photos. These aren’t the greatest, since I was dark, but they’ll do.
This is a photo of Evergreen Walk in South Windsor looking in one direction.
And this is Evergreen Walk in South Windsor looking in the other direction.
I kept telling Laura that this area is reminding me more and more of when I lived in Atlanta, GA. Everything is new and very nice.
This is a photo of Burtons Grill in Evergreen Walk.
I snuck this shot without too many people seeing me. I have a feeling they would’ve called me a dork.
This is Pottery Barn in Evergreen Walk.
Just in case you ever wondered what the inside of a Pottery Barn looked like. Ahh, the joys of a new camera.
This is a very aggravating post to write. It’s a wonder I am sitting here and not in a mental hospital right now.
Let me offer some background. For the past few weeks, Laura’s computer has been showing the signs of hard drive failure. The computer is about 6 years old and has a 30Gb hard drive. It’s time to upgrade and get a new one. Last night, we ran out to Circuit City to pick one out. Upon looking at Circuit City’s selection, I was shocked to see about 95% of the computers now come with Windows Vista 64-bit. I asked the very new salesperson about that and he told me that’s the way they were coming now. Since I put my utmost trust in Microsoft, I figured that this is the way things were going to be and everything was going to work out fine. We picked out a HP Pavilion a6500f Desktop PC (KQ495AA#ABA).
When we got home, I started it up and did the things you do to a new computer. Then, I shut it down and put the old Linksys wireless card in and tried to run it. It didn’t work. I decided that I needed to find the Linksys 64-bit version of the adapter driver. Nope. No where to be found. Apparently Linksys hasn’t yet realized that this version of Windows is being sold to the masses. Oh well, I did some research and found that trying to find a wireless adapter for a 64-bit operating system is not all that easy. I finally narrowed my search down to a D-Link DWA-552 Xteme N Desktop Adapter. I chose this because it was available at Circuit City and the clock was ticking. We had work to do. We were now backed up a half-day. Also, the only reason I knew about this wireless adapter card was because I read about it on some forum discussing the issue. D-Link doesn’t officially support the 64-bit driver, yet they offer it. I had to download it from their website.
I ran up to Circuit City this morning to get the card, which wasn’t a problem. I came back and installed the card and had to call D-Link tech support for assitance installing the new driver. As I was on the phone with tech support, the computer froze. I restarted it (by physically pushing the on/off button) and continued to set up the driver. Everything set up fine without further event. I was able to connect to the network. Then, the computer froze again. I told tech support about this and she said there have been a few problems with this and I might need to update the BIOS. First of all, I don’t even know what a BIOS is, nor do I think I need to. It has nothing to do with my line of work. I tinkered with the computer for a few more hours and then called HP tech support. By the way, the computer kept freezing up (or crashing, whatever the difference is) about 25 more times during that few hours. It seemed to do it more when I was shutting down the computer and sometimes it got stuck on the welcome screen. The lady on the phone was nice and suggested that we burn some backup CDs and reinstall the operating system. I told her thanks but no thanks. I really don’t think I will be reinstalling the operating system of a 12 hour old computer. Seriously, this is not my problem.
I brought the computer back to Circuit City this afternoon and traded it for a less expensive (and slower) HP Pavilion A6400F Desktop PC. I just finished configuring it and (knock on wood) everything is good. It has the 32-bit version of Windows Vista. What a pain in the $%^&.
What is the moral of the story? Stay the hell away from Window Vista 64-bit, unless you want to sit there and try to get it to run. Can you imagine if I tried to install two things?
