Tree Stumps = Pain in the Rear
Two summers ago I struggled with two dead trees in my back yard. We had them dropped to the ground and Erin, Reuben, and I chopped them up and moved them to the woods (link to story).
There may have been a small grass fire or two, but I put them out right away...unless I wanted to take a picture first.
During the burning I had to bear the overprotective motherly concerns of my neighbor. A barrage of questions like:
The burning helped somewhat but was probably a bigger risk than it was worth. So after an hour I stopped burning and went back to my hacking and sawing.
Last summer I removed the first of the two stumps. If I wasn't so stubborn and cheap I would have paid $50-100 to have both stumps removed professionally but I wanted to do the job manually with nothing more than an axe, a shovel, and hand saw. I've taken out stumps before but nothing bigger than a 6" tree or large bush. These trees were both 18+" in diameter.
The first stump was pretty bad. I dug around it but couldn't get at the roots because they were too far down. So I hacked away at the stump top with an axe until it was near ground level and then trimmed it the rest of the way with a hand saw until I could just barely cover it with dirt.
I saved the bigger stump until this summer. My plan was to gradually whittle it down with an axe by starting early in the spring and just hacking away for a few minutes every night. Unfortunately, after a few attempts I stopped making progress. The wood just didn't want to nicely break away. After 4 months of chipping away I was still left with this mess.
Then I had the great idea to burn the stump. I was pretty nervous about it since I knew it was illegal to burn anything on the ground in Kentwood but I decided to take my chances.
There may have been a small grass fire or two, but I put them out right away...unless I wanted to take a picture first. During the burning I had to bear the overprotective motherly concerns of my neighbor. A barrage of questions like:"do you know how to control a fire?"
"do you have a hose?"
"what will you do if it gets too big?"
"are you drinking plenty of water so you don't get dehydrated?"
"do you have your inhaler with you in case your asthma gets bad because of the smoke?"
It was miserable. No, I won't burn your house down and yes, I have been around a fire before...at least once or twice.
The burning helped somewhat but was probably a bigger risk than it was worth. So after an hour I stopped burning and went back to my hacking and sawing. Eventually I made it down to ground level and covered it up with some nice topsoil and seed.
It was WAY more work than it should have been but I feel better about myself knowing I did it all with brute force and a little fire. After the burning fiasco my neighbor had a stump grinder look at it - he quoted $30. I felt slightly foolish...but at least I still have my pride.
posted by Randy and Erin at Thursday, August 30, 2007
1 comments
Nate brought his family's boat so we launched it on Saturday and everyone endured the cold air to enjoy tubing. 
But then someone had the idea to do a jumping picture. We set 5 different cameras up on a 10 second timer and then set them all off at once. We tried to time our jumps so that we would all be in the air when the cameras flashed but it was much harder than we anticipated. The experiment was very dorky but much more fun than I imagined. 
Friday night was the rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, and hanging out. Saturday morning Michael treated us all to a round of golf, probably to ease his nerves a little.
He looks better with Matt.
For the 20th wedding in a row Erin made the comment to me that she wants us to have another wedding. Yeah, probably not.
...but it is still fun to go to friends' weddings. Congrats Mike and Sarah!
After another short hike around a lake we spotted the fire tower at the high point of the park. It was pretty tall and you're allowed to climb it so we had to stop. It swayed as we climbed but it was definitely cool.
