Lake News

Or lack thereof. Nothing going on of any importance. We’re getting an occasional rain now so the lake is creeping up. It probably rose 4-6” in July but for sure we have plenty of room for a couple of rainy, rainy hurricanes.

Last year I bought a small electric chain saw as part of our hurricane preparedness kit. I like electric appliances because I know they will work and I’ve never seen a gas chain saw that will start easily if not used more or less daily. Of course the disadvantage is not having electricity after a storm but I have a good generator and plenty of extension cords so as long as the generator starts, I should be able to cut my way out. It’s not a stretch to assume that a good wind storm could bring down a couple of trees across our driveway and isolate us for a few days. After I bought it I tried it out on a couple of trees and decided to wack down three dead ones this past week. One of the trees came down exactly where I’d aimed it; the second was generally in the right spot – maybe a few feet off; the last one totally had a mind of it’s own and crashed down 90 degrees from the target area and crushed a few plants that weren’t supposed to be crushed. I managed to do the job with no crushing or cutting blows to my body so I call it a big success. The first time I did it, I ended up with a tree on top of me and took 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get out from under it. I’m just not a chain saw kind of guy.

We had an old derelict house trailer on the road coming to the house and it really trashed up the neighborhood. It had been there for years and was apparently hurting some of the local property owners who were trying to sell. The owner started tearing it down about 9 months ago. A guy came in and stripped off all the metal in a few weeks so initial progress was good. A couple of months later, a big piece of construction equipment came in and pushed it over but left it pretty much intact. Over the next several months nothing happened except people coming by and stealing lumber so it remained a large trash pile. I had heard the plan was to burn it but we were in a “no-burn” zone until June. Last week they started burning it off, bit by bit. As of today, it’s just a pile of ash and a pile of sheet metal which the initial strip job missed and I suspect it will be totally cleaned up by this weekend. Needless to say we’re all glad that eyesore is history but it did add a certain redneck character to the place.