Soft Wood is No Good

I have been slowly, very slowly, remodeling my kitchen. My friend, Tonya, has been helping me. I am just getting into DIY projects- she is the queen. I honestly feel like she could do anything, and I would just tag along.

Anyways, since she has been such a huge help to me, when she asked if I would help her split wood for her wood burning fireplace, naturally- I said yes. Not knowing what splitting wood was all about. So yesterday, we borrowed my father in law's log splitter (thanks Grandpa Gary) and we set out to cut some wood.

As I drove up to her house, I saw a rather large pile of even larger pieces of wood logs. I thought, okay, this is going to be fine. We can do this. What I was really thinking, was, okay- Tonya can do this, I have no idea what I am doing.

The pile of wood

Tonya splitting wood

We quickly set up a system, and even called her mom over to help. The three of us took turns hauling, splitting, and stacking wood. Time was going by pretty fast, we hadn't run into many problems- with the exception that there were some logs that were quite heavy. Tonya took a break to take some ibuprofen, I stopped to take some pictures.

We were about 1/4 of the way through, when Tonya's sweet mother said, "Wow, these pieces of wood sure are hard."

Tonya quickly responded by saying, "Well ya mom, soft wood is no good."
As soon as she said that, all three of us started to laugh. Come on, that's funny.

Me, next to our pile of "hard" wood

After about 3hours of wood splitting, a pizza break, and a lot of laughs, we were finally done. We felt, tired, but accomplished.

I never, in a million years, (after living in a city in California) thought that I would ever spend 3 hours, on a winter day, splitting wood with a friend. But that is why I love living in Wisconsin. I never know where I will end up or what I will end up doing. In many ways, my life is way more exciting than I ever dreamed it could be. 

By the way, so that I could spend this fun day with a friend, Garth had both kids at home. While he was trying to get some work and studying done, Lucy successfully dropped, and smashed, a large Christmas snow globe on our hardwood floor. I don't know what is more disturbing, the broken snow globe, or that Christmas is right around the corner, and Lucy ruined one of my few Christmas decorations?