We don’t heat our home with firewood but Barb and I love a good fire. So I’ve been splitting logs for a lot of years. I used an axe until someone told me about splitting mauls. It’s hard work but good exercise (I told myself). But I’m done with the maul. Barb bought me an electric log splitter. She’s awful good about researching stuff like this and chose a very inexpensive splitter by WEN. At less than $300 it might be the cheapest electric log splitter sold. But set-up was simple and I was splitting logs in no time.

Took about an hour to split enough wood to last us the winter. We keep a rack on the deck and the rest in a big stack out back.

Every year about this time our homeowners association has a picnic/business meeting. Rotates from home to home each year. The picnic is okay for meeting any newcomers (rare) but the business meeting is what you’d expect. Mostly a few people (same every year) bitching about the roads or or the dues we pay to maintain them. Eventually we get around to electing new officers (getting more difficult every year.

Thanks to the pandemic, this years meeting will be via Zoom and (mercifully) limited to 40 minutes. Plenty of time to do what needs to be done. People can email their complaints before the meeting so we can have an agenda from the git-go.

The new roof is on and the crew did a nice job of cleaning up. They made a couple of sweeps with their big magnets, looking for stray nails. And they got most of them, but I did a sweep with my little magnet stick (just our chat driveway) and found some they missed. To be expected. And in fairness, a few of these were there before they did the roof.

The roof of our house was one of thousands that got damaged by a bad-ass hail storm back in March. A crew is coming Monday to make the repairs and a couple of hard working gents showed up today to get things ready.

Wonder how they got the shingles up on the roof before someone came up with the conveyor belt. Whatever they pay these guys, it isn’t enough.

UPDATE (17aug20): The pounding you hear is crew of hard-working men putting a new roof on our house.

Since the March hail storm, thousands of homes in this area have had new roofs installed and I’ve been wondering where the old shingles went. Either the land fill or an asphalt recycling place. For a smaller house like ours, the land fill would charge about $250 and the recycling place about $175, but they won’t take a load if there’s trash mixed in. A larger home would cost $350 and $250 respectively. (numbers are approximate)