Quiet(ish) Sunday

Today, I noticed that there were a lot of ducks on the pond. They weren't there yesterday, and I wonder if they are going to be there tomorrow. I wonder if it was because the now-quickly-cooling temperatures are causing a last group of ducks (and geese) to shift southward.

The south side of the lake is icing up, with the ice sheet slowly crawling outward over the open water, up to edge of the tree shade. Will there be a sheet of ice by next weekend? Well, if the nighttime temperatures actually keep dropping well below freezing, then I would say that it's likely!


I also found that - before the snows of Wednesday night - there was an ash tree that had fallen on the boardwalk. Ooops. Gotta go chop that up. But when I got to the boardwalk, I decided that - instead of trying to make it into firewood - I would merely chop it away, because I didn't want to risk ruining the boardwalk with a careless swipe of the chainsaw. After that, I decided to take the wheelbarrow (I had put the chainsaw in the wheelbarrow to preserve my arm - that thing gets heavy to tote) around to the other side of the lake, to chop up some fallen trees that I had been meaning to get to.

After taking out an old felled ash tree, I noticed that the chainsaw was getting significantly more blunt than earlier. Damnable ash: you are such a hardwood to cut! (Pun intended.) So I spent about an hour sharpening the saw and filing to the (hopefully) correct depth.


I really hope that I don't have to deal with too many more ash trees. They are slowly falling; most not across a pathway. However, it remains the most felled tree in the forest these past few months.