More Tired

So here we are at the end of our first week. Want to know what I've been doing? Good. I'll tell you.

Wednesday: Like I mentioned, my first wood-splitting shift was Tuesday morning. I'm not going to lie, I was nervous. I was picturing some kind of contraption where you would put the piece of wood down and an ax or a guillotine blade or something slams down at lightning speed, with wood chips flying everywhere. It's not like that at all. You stand the wood up under the blade, pull the handle down, and the blade sloooowwwwwly comes down. I think it's mostly the pressure that splits the wood, not the sharpness of the blade. I didn't touch the blade ever, but it didn't look sharp at all. So since this is a two-person job, while one person is getting bored just sitting there (on a piece of wood - where else?) operating the splitter, the other person is doing all the hard work. The other person grabs unsplit wood (rounds) from the pile and stacks them next to the splitter. This hard-working other person also has to load split wood in a wheel barrow and wheel it up the muddy slippery hill and dump it in the wood pile. My partner and I decided to switch jobs every half-hour, which worked really well. Right when you get bored of splitting or right when you get tired of hauling wood, it's time to switch. The morning actually went by really fast like this. I don't mind splitting at all.

In the afternoon, my team split up again. One group went off to put up a snow fence, and my group went to attack some barbed wire. About half a mile away from the lodge, Angie told us there was a lot of barbed wire that was still there from...something. I don't think Calwood put it there, and that it was already on the property when Calwood bought it or something. Anyway, apparently it was killing trees, and one time a kid got really hurt in it, so it had to come down. So Becky, Jessica, Marquis, and I hiked up there (remember how we love hiking?) armed with wire cutters. It was at a place called Longview, which has probably one of the best mountain views I've seen so far. We all actually had a lot of fun with this job. It was like a treasure hunt, with the treasure being potentially stabbed by wire. The wire was all mingled in or around trees or buried under the piles of snow still on the ground. We had to hunt it down, then attack. A lot of it was all tangled in branches or just in itself, some actually went under the ground, and some was attached to trees. Becky was like a barbed wire ninja. Almost all of the places with wire, she found. We had to go way off the trail into the snowy Narnia-like forest to get it all. Angie told us to bundle it up, so we cut in pieces of about three feet, gathered 15 or 20 pieces together, and wrapped another piece of wire around it. I think based on how many bundles we made, we estimated that we removed about 500 feet of barbed wire. Seriously, we all did have fun with the wire cutting job. This was definitely one of my favorite days so far.

In the evening, we had to do PT (Physical Training). Everyone in NCCC is supposed to do at least 45 minutes of PT three days a week. When we work until 4:30 and it gets dark by 5, we don't have a lot of PT options. On Monday pretty soon after we first arrived here, we did some yoga. Wednesday, we did a Pilates video. It was actually a pretty intense workout, but there was also a lot of laughing at the people in the video. There was the leader person giving instructions who was way too happy about it, and all the demonstrator people. The best were Dagne (no, I don't mean Daphne) demonstrating how to do variations on the exercises "for those of you with weak backs," as the instructor told us several times, and Saul, who had this huge smile on his face the entire time.

Thursday: In the morning, we had to go to a pile of cut rounds that Angie had made the day before. Angie is a monster: she spends most of her days chain sawing trees and doesn't seem to ever get tired. Anyway, she made a huge pile on Wednesday and we had to load it in her truck. In the "downtime" while we waited for her to come back with the empty truck after she dumped our load over by the splitter, we hauled some REALLY FREAKING HEAVY pieces over from far away. Way far away, she had cut some really big trees. Most of these pieces were cut to pretty short lengths, but they were so big around that they were HEAVY. We had log carrying tool, but it's really awkward. There are two hooks that go into both sides of the wood, then a handle on either side for two people to carry it. There were nine of us out there and two log carriers, but it was so hard that no one could make more than one trip with a log per "downtime." Two pairs go get a log, bring it back, two more pairs go get a log, bring it back, then everyone but the person who sat out that turn is tired. Once we were done loading all the smaller pieces, we had to load the big ones. The floor of the truck is maybe slightly lower than my shoulder. It took three or four people to get the big ones up there. After we loaded the big ones we had brought over, Angie decided to drive her truck over to where the big ones were. I wish we could have saved ourselves the trouble of carrying eight big ones over, but oh well. Did I mention that the ground we had to cross carrying the big ones was covered with about seven inches of snow?

In the afternoon, we were inside oiling the lodge. Tip of the Day: If you ever find yourself living in some sort of log structure, like our lodge, the logs must be oiled every year to prevent cracking and splitting. Angie said that in the winter, when people make fires, the dry air makes it really easy for the logs to split. So first we had to go over all of them and clean the dust off, then go back over them with Old English. It wasn't bad. It wasn't at all strenuous, and we had music playing. Not a bad day at all.

Today (Friday): This morning, we dug some ditches. Along the road, there are several water drainage pipes that get dirt and gravel piled up around them. We had to dig little bowl shapes around them to allow as much water as possible through. If those pipes are clogged, whenever they get two feet of snow that melts quickly, which happens often, it all runs down the hill and floods the road. The ground in some of these places was pretty frozen, requiring some pick-ax action, but the non-frozen places weren't too hard to dig out.

This afternoon we all split up again. Two people oiled more rooms in the lodge that we hadn't gotten to yet, two people were splitting wood (there are always two people splitting), two people went to cut more barbed wire in a different area than my group was on Wednesday, and the rest of us went to the barn. Angie said there were a bunch of benches in the barn that we needed to pull down, see which ones are beyond repair and throw them out, and see which ones could be fixed up to use at the lodge. Most of them just needed minor repairs, and it was a pretty fun and easy afternoon. The best part was when we found some kind of plastic goose decoration thing, and Angie told us to go release it out onto the frozen lake. It slid pretty well and ended up almost right in the middle of the lake. We talked about naming it, but I'm not sure if we decided on Gary or Gustav.

Since we do PT on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, today was another PT day. We all got done with work at about 3:30, so we had some daylight left for once. We played kickball out on the recreation field, half of which was covered with about eight inches of snow. There was some unsnowy ground that we used for home plate (which was a tree - what else?) so the ball would roll easily for pitching, but the rest of the field was snowy. Since we wanted to do PT as soon as possible after work to use the daylight, we were still in our uniforms. People have been wearing a variety of shoes each day, and on this particular day, I wore my steel toes. Let me tell you, running through seven or eight inches of snow on uneven ground in steel-toed boots is NOT EASY. My legs are still pretty much dead. I think the game turned out much more intense than we were expecting. My team won with a score of something like 21-2. It was fun, but pretty tiring.

So that was my first week. If you didn't notice, there's another new post right below this one. That's right, two posts in one day. I really wish I could post pictures, but I don't think it's allowed. I guess it will have to wait until winter break. I hope everyone is doing well!