Brother in-law to the Rescue!

well kids, i thought i had enough firewood to last us until april; but no, we were close to running out this week. the fireplace is our main source of heating up here. our house is pretty much a glorified cabin; but boy what a cabin it is surrounded by five acres of evergreens at 8800 feet of elevation! the wee bit of firewood is the before picture-until scotty came down to help. if that's the trade-off of living up here versus creature comforts of heat, i'll take it 100% of the time!
i had a grand idea to use the atv to go down to our back yard (and a lovely backyard it is-just look at that picture!) to fetch the wood and leave it all to the glory of the internal combustion mule; but, the snow's so deep i got it stuck twice even before i descended into the backyard. i did the one-man, reverse, hand-on-the-throttle, pulling it (while standing next to the atv) until i had traction.
i had to resort to the rocky IV strategy of snowshoeing to the backyard and picking up the cut trees the previous owners downed for the fire zone of safety (remember when rocky was training to fight the russian and trained in a barn in the middle of the siberian taiga for his workouts?) and hand carry it to the work area. i sunk to my knees even using the snowshoes. it was only until the 5th or so round trip that my snow path was compressed enough so that i could walk normally, carrying my posts. before scotty came i hand carried ten posts. when scotty came, he strapped on some snowshoes and we picked up eight more. i couldn't do anymore and have energy to cut and quarter the posts, so we quit the hand carrying business and went to chopping. so we divided the workload: i cross-sectioned the trees with my lovely stihl chainsaw (the quintessential hillbilly tool) and he quartered the big posts with the axe and splitting maul.
when we were done we were quite satisfied with our days' efforts. it was: a nice stack of wood outside and wood flanking our minuscule firebox for a week's worth of heating (if you look carefully you'll see our lovely german shepherd, adela). a cold front's coming in tonight and it's quite a mental relief that we'll comfortably ride it out (plus, if worse comes to worse, it bought me time to either a) buy firewood to haul in my truck or b) bust out the rocky IV version 1a again in-between the cold snaps). nothing like an honest day's effort hanging with my brother in-law who's a pretty cool fellah. ite den. next time i'll wrestle a bear, buy a bowie knife, and sport a coon skin hat (sans pants!).
for a musical sidebar, i scored on these cool sonic gems (from the jefferson county public library nonetheless!): rufus wainwright's debut album (rufus is an interesting fellah...), mingus' the black saint and the sinner lady (mingus is nutty enough, this i can hang with), broken social scene's feature of kevin drew's spirit if..., and the new pornographer's twin cinema (you gotta love neko case y'all!). you can click on their respective reviews on my links here in my blog's margins if you're interested in checking out something different and non-formulaic.