Four Cats, One Dog, and a Birdfeeder Habit

You can, vaguely, see the tree lying right-edge to almost left-edge, with the top of the tree in the driveway.  It doesn't help that most of the autumn maple-tree leaves in the area were blown against the downed tree.  With the mud from the newly-melted snow, everything is more-or-less a uniform reddish-brown.

The fallen object is actually just the upper-half of a 40' fir.  This image shows where it broke-off the trunk.  The tree was about as tall as it's neighbor to the left.  Had the entire tree come-down, it might have struck the power-lines on the opposite of the driveway.  That would have been bad.  It would have interrupted electrical service to the house, leaving us without a sump-pump in the middle of a bunch of melting snow.

Yesterday afternoon, Nicole & I took care of the downed treetop.  IANAL(umberjack), but I have been friends with one or two, helped Dad with the winter's firewood more than once, and read this book when I bought my first chainsaw.  Believe it or not, this is probably the most dangerous thing I've done with a chainsaw (not that I've done much, you understand).  The bottom-end of the trunk is above my head and dangerous to cut.  The top-end spilt into 3 trunks, so the weight is uneven and more prone to roll.  There are many springy pine-boughs compressed under the trunk.  Cut the wrong thing and the tree moves, maybe rolling onto you or driving a branch, the saw, etc. into you.  In this picture, you can see how I cut the limbs off the upper side, then lop-off the three tops.  That removed a lot of weight.  Then, starting at the top, I tested each branch on the sides, and cut them if they weren't under compression.  That left me with the tree balanced, accessible, and lighter.  After that, I carefully cut firewood-sized segments from the trunks until I thought the tree light enough to pull forward (out of its neighbor's branches) and roll onto the branchless surface.  After that, it was a simple matter of limbing the remnant and cutting it into firewood.

The brushpile on the left is about 1/3 of the total.  You can see the chainsaw in the background, to give an idea of the size of the pile.  I joked that we should be careful removing things from pile of pine boughs -- Les Stroud might be sleeping under them.  Nicole got the crappy job -- moving the 2-6' boughs to someplace else.  Trashed a pair of gloves with the sap.  Most of the cuttings she added to an existing brushpile.  I took some of it to the far-end of the property and dumped it there.  Should keep the bunnies & such warmer.

We bought it to replace the aged metal one left by the previous owners.  In the condition shown, it lasted less than 1 winter.  A plow hit it.  If you look closely, you'll notice 2 slots in the front of the post-cover, and a sliding-rail connection between the post-cover-and-newspaper segment and the mailbox proper.  The slots are for the screws that hold the cover to the post.  When struck by a plow, the torque is sufficient to (1) knock the segments apart (they're held together mostly by friction) and (2) wrench the lower segment around and off the post.

I purchased a Swing-Away Mailbox Bracket from Lee Valley.  The mailbox, proper, was undamaged.  I mounted it on the horizontal arm, and it was OK for a while.  (The swing bracket has been excellent.  Aside from the minor matter of it not returning to it's original location after being struck.  It's endured multiple plow hits.)

The second flaw in the mailbox became apparent only recently.  It's held closed, at each end, by a magnet.  Obviously, the magnets don't work on plastic.  There's a small steel plate screwed to the top of each opening.  The screw is small, not a bolt, and penetrates one layer of plastic.  Over time, the screw ceases to effectively hold the plate.  The plate rusts, interfering with the magnet's ability to hold.  Eventually the screw fails, or the magnet does.  The doors fall open.

The small-town Post Office here isn't  good at following directions.  Previously, we've left directions to hold our mail until we retrieved it.  Inevitably, despite our instructions, it would be delivered en masse on the first day of resumed postal service.  So, this time, we bowed to the inevitable and left instructions for the accumulated mail to be delivered.  Of course, we returned (at dusk!) to find the mailbox had been struck, the doors open, and a (presumably) a week's worth of mail had scattered in the 30 MPH wind.  We found some of it.  It's also possible that the Post Office kept the mail (because, of course, that would be exactly what we didn't instruct them to do).  What we found was very dry (for having lain on the newly-snow-free muddy lawn), so probably not on the ground long, and about what we'd expect for a single-day's delivery.
I'll be replacing the mailbox.  Soon.  Or maybe I'll just epoxy the magnets into place.

Did I mention the tree partially across the driveway?

Here's the result:

I have to say, I'm unusually satisfied with this one.  I don't know why.  The dog ramp I designed an constructed from scratch.  That was much more complicated and difficult.  I suppose it's the speed of execution.  I saw it, went into the shop, and built it.

Best guess is a female House Finch.  But really, I don't know.  She has the stubby, heavy, curved bill; the general indistinct brown streakiness; the gray behind her head (not really as prominent as seen here -- she was grooming it); and those could be whitish wing bars.  Sibley says they're here in the winter.  Whatever, she was cold.  This bird is hunkered-down on a depressed paver, against the wooden edging.  She's about as far out of the wind as it was possible to get that day.  Noticed her, became concerned, but she flew away a few minutes after this picture was taken.


New bird to me (yay!): Song Sparrow.  Gray and brown stripes on the head, heavy gray bill with a little color on it, brown stripes on white body converging to a spot on the chest, long & rounded tail.  Right place (Michigan & feeder) at the right time of year.

Saw this goldfinch sitting in the middle of the feeder full of Nyjer (thistle) seed.  I immediately thought, "Man, there's always some kid has to pee in the pool."

???  bi-colored bill like a Tree Sparrow, but lacks the distinctive rufous & gray head.  Dreaded House Sparrow, maybe?

Dark-Eyed Junco (Slate, male).  The thing in his beak is a freeze-dried insert larva.  Almost as many of these as there are goldfinches.  They don't (generally) eat from the feeders, though; preferring to scrounge seeds fallen beneath the feeders.  They have a neat hop-and-2-footed-scratch routine to uncover seeds buried in the snow.

Downy Woodpecker (female).

Downy Woodpecker (male -- red patch at the back of the head).  I really like that beady black eye.  I think he was watching me.

Mourning Dove.  Fat waddling gentlemen, unruffled at their buffet.  Unless a Blue Jay appears.  I've watched 30 other birds spook from the feeders, for no apparent reason, leaving 3-6 doves calmly strolling about the grounds.

Red-Bellied Woodpecker (female -- no red patch on top of head).  Note the rose-colored patch on the belly.  Largest bird to appear on the feeders, yet.  Strangely, also the easiest to spook.  Saw bird many, many times before able to take her picture.  Reacts to my movements, even only seen through window.

Tufted Titmouse.  I can always tell when a Tufted Titmouse is a the seed feeder.  They shell seeds against the feeder-arm.  Taking a seed in its beak, a bird will perch on the arm (like the chickadee and Chippy shown above) and hammer the seed against the metal arm until it opens.  This makes enough noise that I can hear it in the next room -- if the house is quiet, I can hear it upstairs.

White-Breasted Nuthatch.  In the characteristic head-down position.  I enjoy their distinctive, "laughing" call.  One the first birds I learned to recognize, and still a favorite.

Back when it had leaves, we took a sample to Bordine's.  The tree-guy there identified it as a Cherry.  Never saw any fruit.  It might have flowered once, the first year we were here.

Even then, it was in rough shape.  I brought-down the lowest horizontal branch, which was obviously rotten, the first summer.  The branch was dropping bark and branchlets into the yard.  We hoped that removing the obviously-diseased branch and applying a fungicide would save the tree.  It did not.  The tree has been succumbing since, each year losing a higher branch.  This last summer it had only token leaves on the highest branches.  A month or two ago we noticed ear-type fungus growing on the trunk.  Clearly dead.

Didn't threaten the house, really (might have brushed the south-west corner, but that's all).  Did threaten the fence.  With the multiple trunks, I needed help to fell it.  Cutting through the south-pointing horizontal branch, outside the fence, was the obvious initial cut.  But I wanted come-along ropes to ensure the tree dropped where I wanted it to drop.  Adam and Liz were here and happy to help (Thank you!).  Nic stayed with Goobs, and away from chainsaws, while we felled the tree.

Now I have to decide what to do with the wood.  The easiest thing is to cut it into firewood.  But I have two 5-foot racks full of firewood already, and the idea of burning Cherry is repugnant.  You make furniture out of that stuff, you don't burn it.  I guess I try to rough-cut it with a chainsaw into planks.  Maybe split some into something resembling turning blanks for Dad.

So, what do you do?  What I did was to line-up the center of the bottom of the jamb and then hang the jamb plumb.  That way, the door wouldn't fall open and the flooring would be correctly centered.  The door hung straight, and didn't fall open.  The jamb projected about an inch into the hallway at the top.  I figured to build-up the wall behind the door trim.  Nicole made me think about it, correctly suggesting that it would look like crap.  So I ripped it out.

  This is a 16d nail.  It is 3½ inches long.  The jamb is standard 1x material (meaning it's actually ¾" width).   (In the image, the nail's stuck into the jamb just enough to stay there.)  Two things: 1) These are $&@!!! to remove, once they're in.  2) These are long -- meaning it's really, really easy to bend one of these while driving it.  I probably discarded half the nails I drove, halfway through driving them.  I actually threw-away half a box of nails, because I will avoid using these whenever possible for the rest of my life.  Nail-gun!  Nail-gun!  Nail-gun!

Once the jamb was free (again!), I decided to worry more about how it looked in the hallway, than about how it looked in the bathroom.  After all, one side of the interior will be in a corner and almost invisible.  So I lined up the top corner of the hinge side, and nailed the jamb plumb.

Looks nice, doesn't it?

Here's what it looks like at the lower corner:


Here's what the lower-half of the striker-side looks like:

The plan is to rip a tapered length of 1x material (circular saw and guide), glue it to the jamb and thus fill the gap between the jamb and hallway wall.  The trim in the hallway will look OK.  The bathroom . . . well, at least the crappy-bits will be low.  And on one side, in a corner that nobody should be looking at.  I'll rip tapered lengths for these, also.  But they'll be against the wall, not filling a gap between the jamb and wall.  It'll be ugly.  But I don't know what else to do.

Of course, that's not the end of it.

The door frame's not parallel.  Not only are the studs not plumb, they aren't in the same plane.  So the door doesn't close all the way at the top, striker-side corner.  Oh, and the &$%#!!! door now falls open, again.  I might still be able to shim the door hinge, and stop it.  But it's still depressing to realize I didn't solve that issue.  Especially since I did solve it with the first iteration.

Just to add insult to injury:

The streaks are where my "flush" -cut saw did exactly what it's designed to not do -- cut the underlying wood.

All in all, a very frustrating education.  I sincerely hope the other doors aren't this bad.  If they are, I might need to resort to more profanity.