Game change... for a mere 12 bucks

Above: The best birthday gift I've bought the spouse in several years.

Of late, we here at the far west branch of FBH have been being the best ants we can be. 

In many a previous summer, it was the opposite...  We were happy grasshoppers, drinking beer, fishing, grilling, and merrily playing with nary a thought to the shortness of the season and the rapid approach of winter. 

Deep, dark, long, firewood-requiring winter. 

For those of you unfortunate enough to live elsewhere, getting in firewood is a given part of  warm months in Alaska, on par with salmon fishing, weeding the garden, and playing out wildly in a bit of seasonally-induced mania. (Granted the first is only true if you live in a place with trees. We do.) Oh, and beer-drinking. 

We generally procrastinated on the firewood-getting and focused enthusiastically on the playing outside and beer-drinking. 

This translated to a fall spent frantically locating already downed spruce or standing dead trees -- and a real push to cut and split it. It wasn't green wood, mind you, but this was not an optimal situation. If it had rained a lot, getting it dry was kind of a pain in the ass. And some years we hit wood stove season without enough.

But no more!  It is June, JUNE, and we've already got quite the stack of split wood in the shed with a pile of rounds waiting to be split. Is it maturity? It is common sense? "What gives this year," you ask?

After years of 'we oughta', I finally bought the S.O. the chainsaw chain sharpening attachment for the Dremel tool.  Instead of having to sit there and sharpen the chain(s) by hand, you just plug in the Dremel and go to town.  It's quick, easy to angle properly, and the end result is you never keep cutting wood with a somewhat dull chain again because you don't feel like stopping to sharpen the chain and haven't sharpened any of them yet.