Refraction

Each dew drop seems like a little world unto itself.

This was a you-know-you're-living-in-the-country-now sort of day. While we were away in Europe, a freak storm hit the village and dozens of trees came down, including one of our neighbour's pines (luckily not on the house). Mr. L. sawed it up a couple of weeks ago, into a neat pile of logs. This should provide us with an excellent supply of firewood for next year's maple syrup operation if only we could manage to cut up the logs. So today we became woodsmen. We borrowed a wood splitter from another of our neighbours - the modern substitute for an axe. (He brought it over in a trailer attached to a 4-wheeler which I also got to drive - great fun, but that's another story.) The woodsplitter consists of a motor driven piston and a stationary axe-like blade. The log is placed between the two. The piston squeezes the log into the blade until the wood splits. That's it! It was plenty of work for the 2 of us to reduce a pine tree to firewood - so glad we didn't have to chop it by hand.

The pine tree was infested with pine borer beetles - maybe that's why it came down. We actually found two or three of them - about half an inch long and rather featureless. They can certainly make impressive holes though.